Colonialism and its aftermaths in prisons in Guyana: An introduction

This special issue presents findings from a collaborative project funded by the ESRC's Global Challenges Research Fund, which researched prisons in Guyana. The project was a partnership between academics from the universities of Guyana and Leicester and officers in the Guyana Prison Service. The disciplinary backgrounds of the university researchers spanned history, criminology, public health, anthropology, sociology, and politics and international relations, while officers were drawn from all ranks including welfare and medical staff. Clare Anderson and Mellissa Ifill's previous work, funded by the British Academy and supported by researchers Estherine Adams and Kellie Moss, uncovered the history of colonial-era practices and operations in Guyana's prisons, up to Independence in 1966 (Anderson et al., 2020; Moss et al., 2020). Prison officers immediately saw contemporary resonances and proposed that we might explore the post-colonial impacts of approaches to incarceration in the country now.

In the ESRC project, we grew our team and co-developed work that centred on colonial history, the post-Independence period and the present day. Our objective was to construct what we called a ‘usable past’ that would bring attention to the ongoing aftermaths of colonial-era prison discipline and could thus nurture reform. While we were interested generally in law, infrastructure, penal discipline, rehabilitation and resistance, our attention was drawn especially to the use and experiences of drugs, including alcohol, among prisoners and the people who work with them, and how we might trace historic continuities in contemporary approaches to, and desires and framings around, substance use. This connected to mental ill health, which was one of the key challenges that the Prison Service had signalled to us as we developed our relationship through our historical work, and which is relevant to both prisoners and staff (Anderson, Moss & Adams, 2020; Anderson, Moss & Joseph Jackson, 2022; Ayres & Kerrigan, 2020; Cameron & Kerrigan, 2020; Halley & Cowden, 2023; Kerrigan et al., 2024; Moss, Adams & Toner, 2022; Moss et al., 2020; Warren et al., 2022).

At the inception of our project, excepting a significant body of work on historical colonial prisons and ‘dark tourism’ (White & Frew, 2016; Wilson et al., 2017), the few studies that integrated history and the present day focused more on law and the criminal justice system than on remand and incarceration (Finnane & Piper, 2016; Matthews & Robinson, 2019; Robinson & Bulkan, 2017). As our research progressed, we joined others in a more prisons focused endeavour that straddled British and other post-colonial contexts, including in North and South/Latin America,1 Africa and Australasia (e.g., Barker & Battell Lowman, 2019; Braatz, Bruce-Lockhart & Hynd, 2022; Bruce-Lockhart, 2022; Davidson, 2023; Gill et al., 2018; Roscoe & Godfrey, 2022; Stuit, Turner & Weegels, 2024). Together we worked towards what we present here as a new, more expansive approach to understanding the genesis and character of prison systems in the formerly colonised Anglophone world, the legacies of which Ayres, Moss & Cameron (this issue) refer to as ‘the building and binding of Empire through coercion and social control’. This marks an important break, we suggest, from an unproblematised and unsatisfactory application of Eurocentric and US-derived understandings of incarceration to the very different historical and contemporary context of South America and the Caribbean, even where historically informed, provocative and stimulating (Anderson, Kebbell & King, 2021; Godfrey, 2020; Guiney, Rubin & Yeomans, 2023). In this sense, and though we regard the term as highly problematic, not least considering the ongoing political weight of the Commonwealth, the endurance of British Overseas Territories, and other legacies of Empire that are ever-present in lives and inequalities in the region, together as a Guyanese and British team we have had decolonising intentions and saw our work as providing a route, or at least a stimulus, for change (see also Aliverti et al., 2021).

As we progressed our work in historical archives, our research with prisoners and prison officers through interviews, focus groups, workshops, surveys and informal discussions, and as we observed life in prisons during multiple visits to Guyana's five prison locations, we came to believe that Guyana, as a former British colony with histories of Indigenous dispossession, enslavement and indenture, like other former colonies and territories in the region, demanded new ways of seeing on its own and on regional terms. Thus, we endeavoured to provide an evidence base on operations in, and experiences of, the country's prisons, historically and in the post-Independence period into the 2020s, and to avoid the use of ahistorical theoretical concepts. In this, we were greatly inspired by Guyanese intellectual and writer Wilson Harris's 1970 framing of the need to overcome ‘old colonial prejudices’, or what he termed the ‘prison of history’ (Kerrigan et al., 2024, referencing Harris, 2008, p.12). This pushed us to work towards the production of empirically grounded conceptual frameworks that are better suited to Guyana and could also provide a starting point for broader explorations of incarceration in northern South America and the Caribbean, in other former slave societies, and in other ex-colonies and overseas territories. These are founded in our contention that punishment in Guyana today can be directly connected to the era of amelioration and emancipation of the enslaved, and the management of indentured labour that flowed into the region after abolition. Aspects of these connections are captured in terms such as punitive coloniality (Anderson, Moss & Joseph Jackson, 2022), in the idea that colonial histories of prison building, legislation, and prison policies seep into all aspects of prison life as a form of hauntology (Ayres & Kerrigan, 2020), that their racialised underpinnings constitute a biopolitics of colonial carcerality (Kerrigan et al., 2024), and more broadly that a colonial imaginary, including of punishment, endures in Guyana today (Ayres, Moss & Cameron, this issue). Drawing on the power of theorist Patrick Wolfe's (2006) interpretation of the creation of settler-colonial societies, we see colonialism in British Guiana not as an event but as a structure implicated in the creation of longue-durée carceral forms which emerged in the 1820s and continue to resonate in the country.

The articles presented in this issue present some of the key themes of our research, both in terms of how a team drawn from diverse disciplinary backgrounds approached international, collaborative prisons research and regarding our substantive findings. Before presenting an overview of the pages that follow, we note here that in common with carceral institutions globally, and to an even greater degree in South/Latin America and the Caribbean, Guyana's prisons are grossly overcrowded, not least because almost half of the nation's prisoners are incarcerated while on remand and awaiting trial (Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, 2024). Certainly, fewer per head of the population are now imprisoned, compared with the colonial era, but historically the criminal justice system set the pattern of remand in confinement which has endured while the scale of the prison estate itself has contracted.

Led by Tammy Ayres, the issue opens with the team's reflections on bringing diverse disciplines together in this project in partnership with stakeholders. While the terminology of multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or (as we choose here) transdisciplinary research appears frequently in funding calls and research strategies, here we attempt to unpack what that meant in and for our research practice in Guyana's prisons context. To create a comprehensive understanding, we needed to place historical and modern textual and other sources in the same frame of analysis, and it was in so doing that we were able to enrich knowledge of punishment in the country, in the past and now. But this did not come without challenges. In this article, we focus especially on the emotional labour and ethic of care that nurtured mutual reciprocity and learning between the academic researchers and prisons personnel. The Global North/South team self-reflectively strove to create equitable and ethical partnerships, through participatory research, and the relationships that we built were foundational to how we approached the research and how that research catalysed aspects of modernisation. As the article outlines, all researchers gained new skills in different kinds of research approaches, and this enabled the team to bring their own disciplines to the analysis while appreciating the richness that the transdisciplinary approach offered.

The next article, by Tammy Ayres, Kellie Moss and Queenela Cameron focuses on substance use, connecting Loïc Wacquant's (2003) concept of the booty capitalism of the streets to Quijano's (2007) ‘coloniality of power’ to surface what they describe as the ‘echoes’ of the colonial past in the formation of Guyana's ‘drugs apartheid’. The authors argue that the management and prohibition of psychoactive substances in Guyana remains grounded in a racialised imaginary connected to colonial histories of enslavement and the labour management of Indigenous, indentured and immigrant workers. This has created an enduring transhistorical pipeline into prison, despite a much-changed international context.

Dylan Kerrigan, Tammy Ayres and Kellie Moss then consider how Guyana's colonial past continues to impact on the lives of prison officers and their families. Taking a phenomenological approach, they move to expand and decolonise Gresham Sykes's (1958) foundational work on prisoners, to describe what they conceptualise as the pains of prison officer employment and to articulate their connections to colonial carcerality. In this way, the article documents how officers see and understand their job, including their experiences of dilapidated infrastructure, long hours, and violence, and their impacts on their health and home lives, to provide a much-needed officer perspective from the region.

Clare Anderson and Martin Halliwell's article moves on to provide a holistic understanding of mental health in Guyana, suggesting that racialised colonial representations endure in its framing, management, and connection to ideas about criminality. This impacts on the operation and experience of the criminal justice system within a larger public health system, notably as the authors suggest, in sentencing, incarceration and rehabilitation. Post-colonial state policies and management show continuities with Guyana's colonial past, though the larger international context is shifting the ways in which government ministries are co-ordinating national efforts to improve mental health care in the republic's prisons.

Closing the feature is Kellie Moss and Kristy Warren's analysis of prisoner agency, which delves into everyday and violent forms of resistance, including the use of intoxicants. The authors situate such resistance today in larger histories of enslavement, labour and plantation society, to reveal how the broad economic, social and cultural drivers of empire – which they term ‘colonially-derived security and order’ – now compel and inform experiences of the criminal justice system, including remand and incarceration. In unpacking layers of agency, both during the colonial period and since Independence, Moss and Warren show that in some instances prisoners themselves prompted changes to law and institutions. However, overall, concerns over security override any desire for reform and rehabilitation even as prison conditions create insecurity.