Uganda’s prison system, much like others elsewhere, was a site of violence used by the state to manage those perceived to be “deviant.” This was especially clear in the late colonial period, when the state responded to anticolonial mobilizations by incarcerating thousands of Ugandans and deporting their leaders, another form of punitive confinement. During the post–World War II period, the prison also had an important economic purpose: along with being a place to punish those who didn’t participate in the colonial capitalist economy, it also became a site where prisoners’ labor could be exploited in the name of “development.” Many of the features of the colonial penal system would leave a lasting imprint after independence. (Bruce-Lockhart 2022:69)
The apparatus that produced prisoners and their labour was strengthened in the immediate post-colonial period when political uncertainty accompanied the constitutional crisis arising from the relationship between the Government of Uganda and Buganda Kingdom. In 1967 the Public Order and Security Act was passed, legalizing preventative detention and the imposition of restrictions on the movement of persons in the interests of public order, public security and defence. It increased the number of political prisoners, setting a dangerous precedent and a new pattern as it introduced and legalized the practice of Government arresting and detaining people without trial. After 1971, Idi Amin’s regime witnessed the creation of paramilitary organizations that included the State Research Bureau, the Military Police, and the Public Safety Unit who effected arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial (Bruce-Lockhart 2017: 22-24).
In her book Carceral Afterlives, Bruce-Lockhart traces the ‘imprint’ of the colonial penal system from 1962 to the accession of the present government in 1986. Here I jump to the present day in order to draw out some further continuities.
Prison Labour and Post-colonial Continuity
The legacy of the colonial era lives on into the present. Arua still means ‘in prison’—for more and more people. The Report of the Auditor General for the year ending June 2022 found that Arua prison, with a capacity for 193 prisoners, held 1,179, giving an occupancy rate of 611%. In Uganda as a whole prisons are extremely overcrowded. The explanation given by the Auditor General was that more people were being arrested, longer sentences were being given and the case backlog in the courts meant a high number of prisoners were kept on remand. The report showed that prisoners on remand exceeded the number of convicts. Petty offenders were kept on average 3.7 months in contrast to the two-month mandatory remand period.
Today, as the Auditor General Report (2022) noted, many offenses are criminalized, so even petty offenders are imprisoned; longer sentences are being imposed. Most important, the courts produce a very large number of prisoners on remand because they are slow and have a large backlog. The inefficiency of the judicial system is responsible for half of the inmates in today’s prisons. We can thus see that today, as in colonial times, prison labour as a resource is made available and maintained through a broader apparatus. The law, the courts and aspects of political economy together function to produce prisoners.