The Society of Captives in an Ethiopian Prison
| Author | Ian O’Donnell |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032885519836947 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2019
Article
The Prison Journal
2019, Vol. 99(3) 267 –284
The Society of Captives
© 2019 SAGE Publications
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in an Ethiopian Prison
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0032885519836947
DOI: 10.1177/0032885519836947
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Ian O’Donnell1
Abstract
Much has been written about the challenges of prison life. Dominant
themes—hearkening back to the classic work of Gresham Sykes in The
Society of Captives—include the pains of confinement, prisoner-staff power
dynamics, the argot roles that shed light on the values of the prisoner
society, and the struggle to find and maintain a stable equilibrium. But our
understanding tends to be rooted in research carried out in Europe and the
United States. This account of an Ethiopian prison returns to Sykes’s work,
with a view to adding some necessary nuance to contemporary debates
about the carceral society.
Keywords
Ethiopia, imprisonment, Gresham Sykes, power relations, pains of
confinement, argot roles
Introduction
Academic considerations of imprisonment elicit a number of predictable
tropes. These include violence, fear, self-harm, mental illness, asymmetric
power relations, and racial strife (e.g., Edgar, O’Donnell, & Martin,
2003/2012; Fazel, Ramesh, & Hawton, 2017; Trulson, Marquart, Hemmens,
& Carroll, 2008). Prisoners spend their time slowly and unproductively, often
the passive occupants of small cells arranged along corridors and stacked in
tiers. The overall sense is one of corrupting lethargy, simmering despair, and
1University College Dublin, Ireland
Corresponding Author:
Ian O’Donnell, UCD School of Law, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
Email: ian.odonnell@ucd.ie
268
The Prison Journal 99(3)
purposelessness (O’Donnell, 2016). Institutional priorities dominate, and
prisoner agency, if not extinguished, is certainly damped down. The apotheo-
sis of these developments is the supermax prison that blights the penal land-
scape in the United States (O’Donnell, 2014, pp. 106-174). But what would
prison look like if prisoners lived communally, mixed freely, generated their
own incomes, elected their own leaders, and went about their business largely
in the absence of staff? During a series of visits to a prison in the Southern
Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Regional State of Ethiopia, I was struck
by the extent to which a society of captives organized along these lines could
function effectively in conditions of extreme material deprivation.
There is a small but growing literature on imprisonment in the Global
South. In recent years, books have been published about the carceral experi-
ence in Bolivia (Young, 2003), Brazil (Darke, 2018; Varella, 2012), India
(Bandyopadhyay, 2010), Nicaragua (Weegels, 2018), and Rwanda
(Tertsakian, 2008). Two issues of the Prison Service Journal have been dedi-
cated to this subject (2014, No. 212, “Everyday Prison Governance in Africa”
and 2017, No. 229, “Informal Dynamics of Survival in Latin American
Prisons”) as well as a special issue of Focaal—Journal of Global and
Historical Anthropology (2014, No. 68, “Prison Climates in the Global
South”). Birkbeck (2011) has offered a framework for making sense of key
points of convergence and divergence organized around the interrelated
themes of regimentation, surveillance, isolation, supervision, accountability,
and formalization. This scholarship acts as a valuable counterweight to inter-
pretations of the captive society based exclusively on work carried out in
Europe and the United States, which have tended to dominate. It encourages
us to reinterrogate a set of understandings of prison life that need to be
stretched and challenged to tease out the elements that can withstand both the
test of time and the application to new environments.
Little has been written to date on Ethiopian prisoner society. What exists
tends to be narrowly focused on health matters (e.g., Abera & Adane, 2017)
or relates to political imprisonment (e.g., Guutama, 2003). There are also
some firsthand journalistic accounts (e.g., Schibbye & Persson, 2015). What
follows is a snapshot of life in a prison in southern Ethiopia organized accord-
ing to the key concerns of Gresham Sykes’s classic book, The Society of
Captives, namely, the regulatory environment (which he addresses in Chapter
2), power relations (Chapter 3), pains (Chapter 4), argot roles (Chapter 5),
and crisis and equilibrium (Chapter 6). Sykes’s book seems like an appropri-
ate one for the task given that it recently celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of
its publication and that it continues to be a touchstone text for prison scholars
(cited 4,198 times—the majority of them since 2010—according to a Google
Scholar search carried out on January 16, 2019). Its influence has been huge,
O’Donnell
269
but how well does it travel? How easily can insights drawn from the New
Jersey State Prison, a maximum security facility located in the city of Trenton,
be translated to a different place at a different time? How much support can
be found for the contention that custodial institutions share “basic similarities
which . . . override the variations of time, place, and purpose”? (Sykes, 1958,
p. xiii).
Mirroring The Society of Captives, this article is short and methodologi-
cally unburdened, aiming to do no more than hint at interpretations of impris-
onment that might benefit from a reorientation toward the developing world.
Its purpose is to add another contour to an increasingly diverse research land-
scape. I begin, as Sykes did, with an attempt to set the scene.
The Prison and Its Setting
The prison I visited—at the invitation of an Irish missionary priest rather than
in the context of a formal research project—resembled a small and bustling
village of around 2,000 men and 100 women. I spent a week there in August
2016, with shorter follow-up trips in each of the two subsequent years
(December 2017 and May 2018). Established in 1957, it was located in a
large town, close to a sports stadium and residential areas. Normal life con-
tinued right up to the entrance gate, with children playing, traders touting for
business, three-wheeled bajaj taxis dropping and collecting passengers, and
locals going about their daily activities. Just inside the gate stood a metal sign
upon which one of the prisoners had painted an almost life-size representa-
tion of a member of staff in camouflage-style uniform bearing the injunction,
in Amharic, to stop and cooperate with any security checks (See Figure 1).
The figure in the painting offers a respectful salute to visitors, suggesting an
ethos of cooperation rather than coercion.
The prison provided food, shelter, education, and health care. Its inmates
were required to source their own clothing, toiletries, and any extras that they
required to ease the burdens of confinement. If they had a family outside, its
support was a pressing concern. As a result, every available space within the
compound was occupied by someone attempting to generate an income one
way or another. The biggest source of employment was weaving cotton yarn
to produce netela (scarves) and gabi (blankets), the occupation of around
1,000 prisoners. Another 300 were engaged in making fishing nets. There
were 100 doing embroidery and 150 involved in crochet, while 30 carved
wood.
Some grew fruit and vegetables and kept bees on a nearby farm to which
they walked each morning with an armed escort. A few tended livestock or
chopped firewood. There was a cohort of talented painters (O’Donnell,
270
The Prison Journal 99(3)
Figure 1. Inside prison gate.
Source. Photograph by Ian O’Donnell.
2018). A dozen or so ran their own shops with others acting as cooks, barbers,
messengers, and cleaners. Further replicating life on the street, there were
even a few shoe shiners. As in any market society, there were large disparities
in income. Some of the more entrepreneurial prisoners managed to acquire
significant wealth while others remained impoverished and reliant on the
charity of their peers.
The male prisoners, half of whom were serving sentences of 10 years and
above, were held in 14 dormitories into which they were locked at around
5:30 each evening and where they remained until 6:30 the following morn-
ing. Dormitory allocation was based on gender and sentence length; no con-
sideration was given to the nature of the offense, age, or ethnic group (of
which there are more than 80 in Ethiopia). Space was at a premium. The
largest dormitory (167 yd2) held 208 prisoners, the smallest 40. Women, and
O’Donnell
271
some of their children, who could remain with them until they were 13 years
old (Mekonnen, 2012, p. 104), were held in four dormitories in a separate, but
nearby, part of the compound. The most spacious (69 yd2) accommodated 44
women and 10 children; the smallest was home to 20 women and eight chil-
dren. One in three of the women was serving at least 10 years.
Double bunk beds were arranged around the dormitory’s perimeter. Each
prisoner had a foam mattress (maximum 30 in. wide), and anyone unfortu-
nate enough not to occupy a bunk rolled out their mattress on the floor at
night. Some...
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