The role of prison labour as resource is stipulated in the core function of the Uganda Prisons Service (UPS), an organ of the state under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The constitution of the Republic of Uganda, 1995 (Article 215 – 217) establishes the Uganda Prisons Service and the Prisons Act of 2006. The legislated mandate is custody of prisoners and rehabilitation of offenders while the assigned mandate is production of cotton, seed and furniture for Ministries, Departments and Agencies. This is further seen in Uganda Prison’s Strategic Objective Number 4: Enhance prisons production and productivity while facilitating delivery of correctional services.
The Uganda Prisons’ workshops are controlled through funding, setting standards, and reward and punishment to improve the workshops’ performance in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability (Akodo & Nandudu 2012:394). This is further seen in the national Offender Rehabilitation and Reintegration figures. The number of prisoners on formal education programs in the FY2019/20= 2,839, FY2020/2021= 2,756 and FY2021/2022= 3,153. The number of Prisoners under vocational skills training programs in the FY2019/20= 21,449, FY2020/2021= 21,996 and FY2021/2022= 18,193. The number of prisoners doing vocational training is many times greater than those doing formal education. The national statistics point to the importance of prisoner labour as economic resource.
In a 2019 conference presentation, the Commissioner of Prisons stated that: ’Rising rates of incarceration and shrinking State budgets have renewed interest in putting imprisoned persons to work helping to defray the costs of their incarceration and reducing the potential for violence that results from enforced idleness in crowded cellblocks’. He spoke of the ‘labour potential’ in the daily average 29,000 convicted prisoners (he did not mention the equal number on remand). Among the country’s 254 prisons are 23 prison farms with considerable resources of arable land—48,000 acres in all. ‘We must develop the human resource… Offenders have great potential that can be tapped for both individual and state productivity’, he concluded (Aloka 2019). The presentation showed the efforts to use this ‘human resource’ to produce, cotton, maize and seeds on prison farms and furniture and other craft items in Prison Industries.
Putting prisoners to work is construed as good for them; they learn livelihood skills and work discipline, which may benefit them after release. It is also good for the underfunded prison system in that prisoners’ labour contributes to the maintenance of the institution that incarcerates them. This same logic was evident in the colonial records, albeit with more racist overtones. African prisoners were to be ‘civilized’ through training and labour. And the prisons, together with the colonial apparatus of which they were part, became more self-sufficient through prison production (Hynd 2015:265). This need to generate income for running the prisons is explicit in the title of the Commissioners presentation: ‘Transforming Prisons in Africa to Productive Services: a Strategic Objective’.
The conditions under which this potential was being tapped had been critically examined in a comprehensive report by Human Rights Watch (2011) eight years earlier. The report found that prisoners were being forced to work under difficult conditions, sometimes even when ill. According to law, prisoners on remand should not be forced to work, yet they were treated as labour resources alongside convicts. Three models of agricultural labour were identified. 1)Prisoners were made to work on official prison farms; the proceeds were supposed to go to prison headquarters for distribution to prisons nationwide, but some might be held back to support the producing prison. 2) Prison labour was contracted to outside people with the declared intent of supporting the administration of the prison, which received insufficient financing from the centre. 3) Prisoners provided free labour for staff’s private farms (HRW 2011: 26-29).