Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to demonstrate that punitive adjustments are a historical modus operandi, a way of doing, living and making operational the future and the daily governance of the prison.

Paper long abstract:

Since the creation of the Makala Central Prison in 1958, carceral punishment has not always been systematically implemented when a crime is committed in Kinshasa. In the cases where this punishment has finally been triggered, it has historically been subject to daily adjustments. It has been lightened, deepened, or interrupted, depending on the social status of the detainees, their interactions with the prison administration, and their ability to negotiate their conditions of detention. These punitive adjustments, which continue in the contemporary DRC, are not a challenge to the prison disciplinary order through the daily negotiations of punishment. They are a permanent interaction, a dialogue that sometimes opens and sometimes closes, around what is appropriate, what is bearable in terms of punishment of those who are identified, rightly or wrongly, as criminals in Kinshasa. The question is the following. What socio-political, humanitarian and economic issues have historically underpinned punitive adjustments in Kinshasa? Based on this question, the current proposal aims to demonstrate that punitive adjustments are a historical modus operandi, a way of doing, living and making operational the future and the daily governance of the prison. They are part of practical norms (De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan, 2015), in which the actors involved in the day-to-day functioning of incarceration operate on the edge of humanism and repression (Super, 2011), taking advantage of the degrees of permeability (Schneider, 2018; Jefferson and Martin, 2019; Bouagga, 2019), and informal activities (Ayimpam and Bisa, 2021) offered by Makala central prison.