The Human Rights Watch study suggests that colonial treatment of prisoner bodies—inflicting pain in order to extract labour—has parallels in the present. It also raises the question of who benefits from the labour resources. Ostensibly, prisoners work to maintain the prison and prison system, just as colonial era prisoners contributed to the self-sufficiency of the Protectorate. Hiring out prisoners to private employers might serve the same purpose, but it is hard to know if the proceeds always revert to prison administration. Certainly, in cases where prisoners are made to do domestic and agricultural work for staff, the beneficiaries are individuals rather than institutions, as was also the case in the colonial era (Hynd 2015:268).
Conclusion
The central argument of this article is that colonial prisons in Uganda had a significant role as labour resource. The study of the colonial period shows how the formation of a legal and political apparatus was necessary to produce and maintain this resource in the era of colonialism and capitalism. The promulgation of laws and the establishment of a court system provided the framework for prisons and prison labour. The examination of the colonial apparatus also shows how racist assumptions about the white man’s ‘civilizing mission’ were part of the facilitating apparatus.
Several different justifications for penal labour appear in the records from colonial to contemporary times. Hard labour may be considered a punishment in itself on a par with other bodily assaults. It may be seen as formative, teaching discipline and productive skills that will be useful for the prisoner after release. Such assertions were part of the denigrating discourse of the colonial period on the need to ‘uplift’ Africans. A common rationale for prison labour is the need to contribute to the sustainability of the system. In the colonial period, prisons were supposed to be self-supporting and also to contribute to the functioning of the colonial system. The same rationale is evident today, as we saw in the 2019 assertion of the Commissioner of Prisons that prisoners must defray the costs of their incarceration. The unspoken interest in, if not explicit justification of, prison labour is that it provides value to individuals, who make use of it for personal purposes, and to a larger system linked to state hegemony and to international capitalist concerns.
Once an apparatus has brought a resource into existence, that resource can become a commodity or, as in this case, it can be obliged to produce commodities. As I have shown here, the colonial apparatus itself and the prison labour resources that it made possible were characterized by deep inequalities of power. What I have demonstrated is that penal labour itself, obviously an example of power disparity, must be understood within wider relations of domination inherent in the apparatus of law and courts.
References
Agamben, G. (2009). What is an apparatus? And other essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Akodo, R., & A. Nandudu. (2012). ’The Government Control and Performance of Uganda Prisons Industries’. In Proceeding of The Eighth Operations Research Society For Eastern Africa (Orsea) International Conference