Improving Africa's prisons: Prison policy in Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia

Despite substantially increasing populations and crime rates in recent decades, the capacity of prison systems has barely changed.

Many African states are confronted with criminal justice systems that are the legacy of the colonial era and prison systems justified by a retributive philosophy that is at odds with rights-based approaches emphasising rehabilitation and reform. Many of these states, including Tanzania and Zambia, are in transition from one-party authoritarianism, attempting to consolidate multiparty democracy and wanting to be seen to observe international human rights standards, while Sierra Leone is recovering from a decade of conflict that devastated both the infrastructure and culture of the justice system, including that of the prison service.

Despite substantially increasing populations and crime rates in recent decades, the capacity of prison systems has barely changed. Whilst governments claim reform and rehabilitation as the aim of criminal justice, in practice prison systems fail to deliver this. Prison systems investigated here are in crisis, burdened with overcrowding and an inability to satisfy basic human rights standards, despite states’ ratification of regional and international protocols and conventions. Addressing this crisis demands action not only in better resourcing and support of prison systems but in challenging practices throughout the justice system - such as inappropriate sentencing policies - that are responsible for high rates of imprisonment.

Author: Simon Robins, Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit, University of York, UK.