CJC Seminar: Who is the Perpetrator of State Harm? Demythologizing Prison Staff in the Global South

Andrew M Jefferson and Tomas Max Martin (DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture)

Prison officers in the Global South are often singled out as the embodiment of the deviant post-colonial state and targeted for reform. Human rights, security, and development discourse render prison officers as ‘already, not yet’ perpetrators in need of professional training, moral sensitization, and legal sanctioning according to universal norms and international best practices. Rarely are their everyday practices and personal lives taken as point of departure (or even into account), when trying to understand how and why prison officers may or may not perpetrate state harm.

While notions of the ideal victim in humanitarian discourse have been significantly problematized (Jensen and Ronsbo 2014), critical, scholarly examination of the category of ‘perpetratorhood’ is still emerging (Critchell et al 2017). In this paper, drawing on research conducted amongst prison officers in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kosovo, Uganda, Tunisia, Myanmar, and India, we unpack the everyday lives of state officials working in prisons from their perspective. We analyse up against a series of fetishized, ideal perpetrator types (the sadistic, bad apple; the legally-constructed culprit; and the elusive commander-in-chief). In contrast, and armed with an ethnographic sensibility, we portray and discuss our interlocutors’ ‘perpetratorhood’ in context. This involves examining their compromised circumstances, affect-laden job situations as well as their dilemma-filled exercise of care and control. It further involves taking seriously their conditions of poverty and disciplinary subjectivation and their inevitable participation in situations where violence is mandated, expected, experienced and shared.

By doing so we illustrate why an ecologically oriented approach to prison officers as amplified bureaucrats caught in the relational dynamics of perpetrative institutions might have more potential to uncover and potentially counter penal excess and state harm than norm-oriented, individualizing approaches to perpetration.