Accessing and Witnessing Prison Practice in Uganda

Abstract

In prison research, gatekeepers are powerful bureaucrats, whose sanctioning makes ethnographic fieldwork within prison walls possible. In the Global South, such sanctioning is more likely than immediately expected as post-colonial prisons are forced open by the proliferation of human rights and as prison managers struggle to ride the tiger of reform towards alliance-building with donors, civil society and international researchers. However, accessing paramilitary state institutions, which testingly reach out to external partners, transcends the initial management of gatekeepers. This chapter briefly introduces the applauded human rights reform process in Uganda and makes a case for the particular kind of knowledge about everyday governance and change that ethnography — especially observations in the field — can offer to gauge prison reform effects. Based on fieldwork experiences from within Ugandan prisons, the chapter explores the register of roles that a researcher may take on to access the people who populate enclosed prison worlds. The management of researcher roles is not simply a question of balancing traction and control of the research process and taking advantage of the researcher’s presence in the field. I suggest that Goffman’s (1989) notion of the fieldworker as a ‘witness’ rather points to the fact that these shifting and contradictory roles propel the researcher into observing and participating in the duplicity intrinsic to prison life and to the ways bureaucracies in the Global South engage with development intervention, custodial imperatives and human rights.