Andrew M. Jefferson

DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture · Detention

Notwithstanding recently published studies there is still much to be done to foster deeper understandings of women’s experiences of imprisonment in Southeast Asia (Jefferson and Jeffries in Gender, criminalisation, imprisonment and human rights in Southeast Asia, Emerald Publishing, 2022). This chapter draws on and takes further our previous work o...

Drawing on ethnographic research in and about prisons in a variety of countries in Africa and Asia, we offer an ‘against the grain’ perspective on prison governance with explicit empirical focus on Uganda and Myanmar. With a general orientation towards the organisation and regulation of everyday prison life and a specific focus on ‘proxy governance...

This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laur...

In this article, drawing on two decades studying prisons and prison reform practices in (mostly) southern countries undergoing transition, I examine the challenges facing anti-torture professionals and prison reformers working in the global south and critically interrogate the assumptions of dominant models of reform. Rights and health-based entry...

Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia features contributions from activist scholars grappling to understand and alleviate the compound sufferings of women and LGBTIQA+ persons as they encounter Southeast Asian criminal justice systems. The collection demonstrates that it is critical that the drivers of gendered ha...

Working with Veena Das’s Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropology after Wittgenstein By Lotte Buch Segal Repairing the World: Ordinary Ethics and the Shadows of Moralism By Emilija Zabiliūtė The Text’s Texture By Marco Motta The Residues of Kinship By Resto Cruz Uncertain Relations with People, Practice, and Ethnographic Knowledge By Andrew M. Jeffer...

Drawing on a case study carried out in Myanmar, this article elaborates on the concept of connectivity as a rich and critical articulation of the way prisoners and their relatives develop and sustain relationships during incarceration. The notion of connectivity offers an alternative analytic frame to that provided by established notions of prisone...

Drawing on preparatory work for a study of prison life in Tunisia, this article explores the twin practices of concealing and revealing that are common features of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Insights from the anthropology of bureaucracy and secrecy are brought into conversation with the experience of prison ethnographers (seasoned and...

This Introduction to the special issue develops a theoretical argument around the interrelations of space and time in sites of confinement by exploring the relationships between ghettos, camps, places of detention, prisons and the like with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed and who...

This article contributes to an understanding of the existential character of confinement by directing attention to the interlinked concepts of tiredness and foreboding. Through juxtaposition and analysis of material gathered among people whose lives are lived under compromised circumstances in Sierra Leone and Palestine we illuminate the way time –...

Prison studies in the Global South are arguably coming of age. In this paper, drawing on almost two decades of experience conducting ethnographically-oriented research on prisons “beyond the West”, we provide an in-depth analysis of this maturation process. It is no longer possible to claim that prisons in African contexts have not been subjected t...

This article adds to a growing body of empirical work on prisons in the global south. It reports on a survey into prison health provision in Sierra Leone, West Africa conducted by a local non-governmental organization (Prison Watch – Sierra Leone). Taking the survey results as the point of departure and engaging with the limited literature on priso...

Blog on the implications of the Elections in Sierra Leone for penal policy and practice: https://matsutas.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/can-you-imagine-reflections-on-the-sl-elections-and-implications-for-penal-policy-and-practice-by-andrew-jefferson-and-luisa-schneider/

This chapter features analysis of two escape narratives, one an intimate, first-hand account of an escape from a UK prison and the other an account based on a public enquiry into a mass escape from a prison in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The analysis shows how escapes are a feature of imprisonment through which sovereign power, authority and legitim...

The contemporary global struggle against torture began in 1973 at a conference organised by Amnesty International. Almost a decade later the organisation now known as DIGNITY—Danish Institute Against Torture was founded as the first Centre set up to treat and rehabilitate victims of torture. This chapter builds on interviews with six members of DIG...

This chapter confronts the idea of ‘the’ prison, that is, prison as a fixed entity. However hard we, that is, prison scholars including ourselves, seek to deconstruct and critique specific aspects of confinement, there is a tendency to slip into a default position that envisions the prison as something given and pre-understood. When it comes to pri...

This chapter illustrates the alarming truth of Mark Halsey’s claim that ‘Incarceration is the medium for the exacerbation of deprivation rather than the means of deprivation per se’ (2007: 361), with point of departure in interviews conducted with former prisoners in the West African country, Sierra Leone. Drawing on material gathered through field...

Faengsler efterlader maerker på dem, der traeder ind gennem deres porte. I denne artikel reflekterer to psykologer over, hvor-dan faengsler har efterladt deres maerke på os under vores et-nografiske feltarbejde i udviklingslande. Gennem refleksion over vores erfaringer bidrager artiklen til en diskussion af følelsers rolle i etnografisk feltarbejde...

Prisons inevitably leave their mark on all who pass through their gates. In this article two psychologists reflect on how prisons left their mark during our ethnographic fieldwork in developing countries. Via reflection on our own experiences the article advances thediscussion of the role of emotions in prison ethnographies. The article is based on...

Based on a range of prison encounters in a variety of locations (Nigeria, Kosovo, the Philippines, Tunisia, etc.) but drawing primarily on material gathered during a seven-month fieldwork in Sierra Leone, this chapter explores the performative and slippery nature of ethnographic research in prisons. The main argument is that prison ethnography invo...

The previous chapter reflected upon the contributions this study makes to ways of thinking about encounters between institutional agents. In this chapter we make one final argument, namely that NGOs would be well served by taking seriously the interdependence between themselves and prisons rather than striving for an unobtainable and mythical indep...

As Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay so succinctly write, [Staff and prisoners] share the same physical and social space. They cannot sustain a state of submerged warfare all the time. They develop familiarities. They banter. There are acts of concern and kindness. It is a situation marked by contradictions. (1996, 196) In the previous two chapters we have...

In this chapter we present our study design and discuss some of the challenges of implementation in the hope that the lessons we learned might be of use to others. We consider how critical psychological practice research, which is a particular version of action research, combined with an ethnographic orientation can make a special contribution to p...

This chapter is about the everyday lives of prisoners. We explore how they experience prison and what matters to them. Specifically we consider the spaces of their everyday lives, their practices of adjustment, their relations to the outside world, and their experiences of uncertainty. In the latter regard we discuss how judicial limbo is a central...

Access is a central theme of any research that involves prisons. It is clearly a central theme for a study of the encounter between NGOs and prisons. In this chapter we begin our comparison of the different styles of encounter between NGOs and prisons by looking at what we call ‘first encounters’ — that is, at the foundation for encounters and the...

This chapter aims to give the reader a glimpse into the worlds of uniformed prison officers in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and the Philippines. The prison authorities in general and prison staff more specifically are central to the work of the three NGOs in our study, firstly because they are gatekeepers — in the ethnographic as well as literal sense — a...

First encounters matter. Encounters can be intimate or at arm’s length, but either way, they matter. Enduring encounters matter even more — indeed, they are critical. These are the key lessons of this book, the key findings of a research project spanning 2012–2013 documenting and exploring the constitutive encounter between prisons and rights-based...

The raison d’être of our three NGOs is in part to change prisons. In this chapter we argue that they too are changed — by the prisons. The differences we observe in the NGOs’ day-to-day practices can best be explained by the fact that the prisons they work in are different. Therefore, they invite the NGOs to respond to them differently. This is to...

In December 2010 members of the Global Prisons Research Network (GPRN) met for a seminar entitled “Dissecting the 'Non-Western' Prison.” The articles showcased in this thematic section were first presented there. This introduction proposes the notion of “prison climate” as a useful way of rethinking variations and similarities across prisons. This...

This article develops an expansive notion of confinement as a lens through which to think about the lives of former prisoners, former fighters and slum dwellers in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities. The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive not...

Human Rights in African Prisons edited by SarkinJ.Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. Pp 254, US$28.00 (pbk). - Volume 48 Issue 4 - ANDREW M. JEFFERSON

In February 2006 a group of over 50 former fighters were released from Freetown’s central prison after over six years’ incarceration. This article traces the ways they handled the move from one form of confinement to another and shows how everyday life for former combatant, ex-prisoners is fashioned according to contingent, unpredictable features o...

This article explores the degree to which anthropological field work can contribute to constructively reconfigure approaches to the critical psychological study of persons in practice. We argue that a line of development within German/Danish critical psychological practice research ought to be consistent with a development of the critical psycholog...

Isabelle Stengers, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps knowingly, echoes a theme of the work of American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1995, p. 136) when she invites in the first edition of the journal Subjectivity, her readers to join her in slowing down, in hesitating, pausing, taking a breath in the face of our own endeavours to ‘produce subjectivity’ (S...

State Violence and Human Rights addresses how legal practices - rooted in global human rights discourse or local demands - take hold in societies where issues of state violence remain to be resolved. Attempts to make societies accountable to human rights norms regularly draw on international legal conventions governing state conduct. As such, inter...

Prisons and prison guards in Africa remain understudied and ill understood and are most often represented in the literature as objects/subjects of critique or targets of reform. To begin to redress this balance, drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among prison officers in Nigeria, this article examines prison officer trainin...

Analysis based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nigerian prisons and training institutions suggests that human rights training interventions can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate a deviant state, and as a form of global social control. External intervention strategies and the uncritical use of training as a universal solution are shown to have fund...

This article addresses the way in which therapeutic practice in an English prison creates conditions whereby both prisoners and prison officers are caught up in networks and relationships of power that contribute to the constitution of particular subjects. The development of therapeutic practice, in relation to prisons and probation, is described a...