The law gave colonial chiefs powers to detain suspects, fine them and subject them to hard labour on colonial works such as construction and maintenance of administrative buildings and roads. The roles of the appointed chiefs included the maintenance of law and order, organizing moot courts, reporting crime, assessment and collection of taxes, enforcing the colonial policies and law, mobilizing labour for and supervising public works and organizing sensitization meetings called Barazas. Berman (1990) observed that the backing the chiefs received from the colonial administrators removed indigenous constraints on arbitrary power. The powers the chiefs accumulated upset the internal balance of the indigenous social formation (Berman 1990:213). The native administration in the service of their master became more oppressive and ruthless, and therefore unpopular in their role of mobilizing forced and prison labour.
As Hynd explains, a variety of forced labour was used in the early colonial period. Although slavery was abolished, slave-like conditions of labour continued for decades. Compulsory labour requirements were enforced by local chiefs up until the end of World War I for infrastructure and military projects. African colonial powers had other ways of coercing their subjects to work, so that it was not until after the inter-war period that the exploitation of prisoner labour became pronounced (Hynd 2015:253-256). Rasil Opindu vividly reminisced that in the1930s when economic crops such as cotton and tobacco were introduced in the region, prisoners were used in the demonstration and pilot farms around present-day Mvara senior secondary school. Later prisons took to the production of cotton on large scale on prison farms.
The introduction of colonial law criminalized certain acts and cultural practices which led to an increased number of ‘crimes’ and convictions. It further introduced prisons as detention places for offenders. The Prison Report for 1912 noted a large increase in the number of those sentenced to short-term imprisonment. It noted that the short sentences constituted the most potent recruiting factor for the habitual criminals. The Report brought to the notice of the Government the desirability of adopting more practical and up-to-date measures (Uganda Protectorate 1913:7). In 1930 Arua Prison was upgraded into a modern prison facility to handle the increasing number of prisoners. Minor offenders were detained at the county and subcounty cells supervised by the county and subcounty chiefs respectively and these prisoners provided labour at the lower local government levels.
The Value of Prison Labour
Colonial discourse often pointed to imprisonment as a means to train and reform Africans. In a report by H. Boulton Ladbury, the Chaplain of the Central Prison, the prisons had provision for spiritual growth to provide religious instruction to the inmates. ‘It was hoped by these means to assist the prisons authority in their endeavor to form in the convicts a Christian character, to give the prisoners a new outlook on life, and to change these dregs of society into men and women who shall become a credit to the community in which they live’ (Uganda Protectorate 1928:14-15). This would groom the convicts into quality human resources who would be able to provide labour even after serving their sentence.