The Conflicting Uses of Prison Visitation in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

The British who ruled Mandate Palestine established a prison visiting system that enabled inspection and oversight of carceral conditions by officials and lay representatives. In often contradictory and variegated ways, both the British and their subjects used this system as a political tool. For the British, lay participation in prison visiting was consistent with colonial pursuits such as advancing penal reform, attempting to “civilize” the local population, preserving the colonial difference, pacifying the locals, and co-opting opposition. The colonized employed prison visits for their own conflicting purposes: to advance both national goals and a universal agenda, to defy the colonial difference and to embrace it at the same time. British repurposing of reformist ideology to advance its civilizing mission was thus vulnerable to the claims of the colonized, who employed prison visiting to advance claims for ethnic and national equality, striking at the core principle of colonial difference. By examining the prison visit policy in Mandate Palestine, this article offers a pioneering approach to the political history of the colonial prison and the tension between penal reform and the larger colonial agenda.