Punishment and the State in Kenya, since 1950

This project is a study of the penal regime in Kenya, in the context of the practice of punishment as administered through state agencies (police, judiciary, prisons), covering the period from 1950 to the present. This encapsulates colonial practices and their transformation during the Mau Mau Emergency (1952-60), and thus will allow an evaluation of the legacy of that critical event upon the penal system in independent Kenya from 1964 until now. Despite the enormous interest in the history of penal policy and practice in Africa, no study of punishment and the modern Kenyan prison regime has yet been undertaken. We know that prisons have been a neglected institution across all African countries since the 1960s, and that today Kenya's prison population is amongst the largest per capita on the continent. Kenya's punishment regime is thought by other countries to be 'harsh': the Kenyan state has, at times, sanctioned extra-judicial forms of punishment. How can we explain these characteristics? Is Kenya's current prison system a product of its colonial heritage, or are other factors more significant in shaping state punishments?
The key research question is: How do we understand the evolution of the penal system and punishment in Kenya since the 1950s? Subsidiary questions then define more specific areas for study: To what extent did British colonial practice shape the punishment and prison regimes? How has Kenya's Prison Service developed since the 1960s? To what extent has Kenya responded to global debates on prison reform, and international 'norms'? What internal debates have there been on punishment and the prison system? The thesis will present findings on two distinct levels: first, there is a need to provide a conventional institutional history of Kenya's prison system over these years; second, there is a more challenging task in seeking to understand how patterns of state punishment changed and evolved over time, placing the prison system within that wider orbit of state action that straddles the colonial and post-colonial periods.
The methodology combines extensive archival research, to be conducted in Kenya and in the UK, with oral histories (with former political prisoners) and elite interviews (with those involved in penal policy and reform) to be gathered in Kenya. Sources available in the UK include materials held by The National Archives, Kew (Colonial Office/Foreign Office papers); the Howard League's collections in the Modern Records Centre, Warwick; the collections of the International Centre for Prison Studies, KCL, and the Prison Research Centre, at the Cambridge Institute for Criminology; and the government serials and legal reports held at The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London. Kenya Hansard is also available online, and will allow examination of parliamentary debates on prisons and prison reform. Sources to be consulted in Kenya include the extensive historical papers of the Kenya National Archive (1950-90); newspaper archives, covering the period from 1960 to the 2020s; reports of the Kenya Law Society (from 1964); holdings of the Prisons Department library (since 1950); and records of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (since 1995). Elite interviews will target participants in the prisons administration in Kenya and those involved in shaping penal policy. Oral histories will be gathered from political prisoners who were imprisoned in Kenya from the 1980s to the 1990s. Some of these individuals were tried and convicted, while others were illegally detained. These prisoners were pardoned and granted a public apology in 2003. The ambiguous status of this category of prisoner opens up questions of state action and legitimacy.