Proxy Governance in (Post)Colonial Prisons: When Prison Officers Delegate Power to Prisoners

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’, we examine how power is distributed and wielded and with what effects. We unpack and illustrate the figure of the ‘other’ prison officer, that is, the prisoner who ‘staffs’ the prison in institutionalised and bureaucratised (if somewhat opaque) ways. We do not seek to exonerate or romanticise such practices but to appreciate their significance while non-normatively and empirically analysing their contemporary form. Illuminating that these power dynamics are not simply archaic remnants of colonial times but integral to contemporary prison governance in (post)colonial prisons serves to challenge the hegemony of accounts of prison officers (and prison governance) based on mostly western/northern sources. Moreover, our analysis aims to further nuance understandings of the exercise of penal power to better guide efforts to counter penal excess.