Abstract
This chapter features analysis of two escape narratives, one an intimate, first-hand account of an escape from a UK prison and the other an account based on a public enquiry into a mass escape from a prison in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The analysis shows how escapes are a feature of imprisonment through which sovereign power, authority and legitimacy are contested, claimed and performed, and implies that more attention to sovereign relations would be a useful supplement to recent theorizing on sovereign practice. Sovereignty, the tales affirm, is not given but negotiated. Both tales illustrate the contingency of sovereignty and the way it is always an effect of social practice and relations rather than an expression of will.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, I have no first- or second-hand knowledge of the state of mind of the drafter of the enquiry’s report. Thus, I confess to having allowed myself a degree of poetic licence in the latter part of this vignette.
- 2.
For an important discussion of procedural justice along similar lines see Bottoms and Tankebe.
- 3.
For more on the prison as agentic, see Jefferson and Gaborit (2015) and Armstrong (under review).
- 4.
In his obituary of Michel Foucault, Edward Said utilizes the evocative phrase ‘fugitive energies’ to capture something of what Foucault believed made up ‘human or even institutional performances in the process of taking place ’ (cited by Cohen and Taylor 1992: 28). Cohen and Taylor recommend that further attention be paid to this notion but they do not elaborate. I would second this but neither time nor space has allowed me to do so within the confines of this chapter.
- 5.
- 6.
Recent work on ethnographic sensibility (e.g., Schatz 2009; Shore et al. 2011; Stepputat and Larsen 2015) has pointed to the potential of immersion in the meanings and significance of policies and texts in similar interpretive fashion as ethnographers immerse themselves in sites populated by people. This is what I attempt here.
- 7.
These were the Office of the Ombudsman, Ministry of Internal Affairs , Office of National Security, Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Justice Sector Coordination Office, Law Officers Department, Sierra Leone Police and the civil society organization Prison Watch. This initiative should come as no real surprise. Following escapes, establishing a committee of investigation is a standard reflex of the state as it seeks to find fault, re-establish control and avoid repetition.
- 8.
These reviews are cursory, consisting only of an annotated list of previous reports with very little information about their substance. They cover a broad time span including a report on the results of a general enquiry into operations and facilities from 1989, a proposal for reform and restructuring from 2008, a report on an escape from the law courts in 2004, a report on a riot and the smuggling of contraband from 2009, a report on the state of prison security from 2001, and a UNDP-sponsored report on security in the light of human rights , as well as the correctional services act 2010 and the prison rules 1961.
- 9.
The Standard Times. Accessible via http: www.standardtimespress.org/artman/publish/artcile_5097.shtml. Accessed 12-08-2016.
- 10.
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Jefferson, A.M. (2018). Chapter 2 There Is No Escape: Constrained Tales of Sovereign Practice and Relations. In: Martin, T., Chantraine, G. (eds) Prison Breaks. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64358-8_3
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