Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the way the compromised and compromising circumstances of prisons in the south present tough challenges for reformers and researchers drawing us into relations of structural and sometimes personal complicity and knocking us off balance.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, drawing on almost two decades of work studying prisons and prison reform practices in so-called developing countries, I explore the potential of the concept ‘compromised circumstances’ to help illuminate the dilemmas and contradictions associated with changing prisons and preventing torture. The focus is on the way the compromised and compromising circumstances of prisons present tough challenges for reformers and researchers drawing us into relations of structural and sometimes personal complicity and knocking us off balance. Research conducted in and around prisons in the global south presents a harsh, stark, troubling image of the circumstances confronting would-be reformers. Climates of misery, political contestation, secrecy, varying degrees of deprivation, stuckness, exhaustion and foreboding are a poor match for the imaginary abstractions and reductive understandings about knowledge, rules and professionalism that often inform reform interventions. I will consider how, confronted by embedded practices of mundane violence and punishment under conditions of poverty and socio-political volatility and conflict, tried and tested modes of intervention cannot be expected to work as effectively as they are imagined to under conditions of liberal democratic peace and welfare. While rights and health-based entry points to the prevention of torture (and prison reform more generally) plausibly make sense under certain optimal circumstances, when confronted by the compromised circumstances of many prison climates something else may be called for. What that something is remains an open question that calls for collective imagination and a rethinking of notions of responsibility, accountability, independence and complicity.