The colonialities of incarceration in the Global South
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2022-05-13

Almost 980,000 people are currently incarcerated across the continent of Africa. Home to 53 countries of profound diversity, Africa is nevertheless a site of several cross-continental characteristics, namely the unsafe and overcrowded conditions inside their prisons. Similarly, in South America, 950,000 people are currently imprisoned, alongside 350,000 prisoners in Central America and 120,000 in the Caribbean. These carceral experiences are widely ignored by US-centric analyses, and when they are acknowledged, they are widely invoked to exceptionalise human rights abuses in order to draw heavily racialised distinctions between “savagery” and “civilisation”. This workshop spawns a different focus: how problems of prison overcrowding - and carcerality more broadly - across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean have been shaped by colonialism and slavery.

Featuring:

Rt Hon David Lammy MP (Chair)
Dr Stella Nyanzi
Dr Dylan Kerrigan
Dr Wangui Kimari
Dr Annie Pfingst