Kenya's prison system has a complex and often brutal history, marked by colonial subjugation, human rights abuses, and inhumane conditions. From the pre-colonial era to the present day, prisons in Kenya have reflected the prevailing social, political, and economic realities.
Pre-Colonial Justice and the Influence of Europe
There is no evidence of pre-colonial prisons in Kenya. Instead, they were an extension of the colonisation project, a punitive device to ensure compliance with the racist colonial order.
Pre-colonial justice systems “were victim rather than perpetrator-centered with the end goal being compensation instead of incarceration” notes Prof. Jeremy Sarkin. However, even in the pre-colonial epoch, interaction with Europe had begun to influence penal systems and ideas around confinement.
In indigenous systems, corporal and capital punishments were reserved for the worst crimes, while, according to Leonard Kercher’s 1981 treatise on the Kenyan penal system, “ostracism, religious sanctions and expulsion were … employed mainly against lesser habitual offenders who had outraged the conscience and exhausted [society’s] patience”. Such expulsions in some societies took the form of enslavement and the slave trade incentivised this punishment to be imposed for an increasing range of crimes.
Similarly, as the abolition of the slave trade was enforced, both slavers and slave rescuers kept victims in enclosed compounds - the former to avoid patrols and the latter to house and supervise them in so-called “villages of liberty”. In this way, the idea of confinement became increasingly familiar to many on the continent, though it was not yet linked to punishment; that came with colonialism.
Read also: Best Nairobi Excursions
Colonial Era: Prisons as Instruments of Power
It is notable that prisons were among the first buildings the British built whenever they went into a future colony. Within 16 years of their arrival in Kenya in 1895, they had built 30 prisons with an average daily incarcerated population of over 1,500. In the next 20 years, the numbers of both prisons and inmates would more than double. By the dawn of the Second World War, Kenya was incarcerating a far greater proportion of its population than British colonies elsewhere in East and Central Africa, with 145 out of every 100,000 natives in prison.
Daniel Branch attributes the high incarceration rate to the fact that Kenya was a settler colony and to the fact that, as a fellow historian, David Anderson relates, “law and order had been a near obsession with certain sections of the European settler community”. Similarly, in Kenya, imprisonment in the service of demands for “law and order” was not about dispensing justice. As Branch observes, “Kenya’s prisoners were serving sentences in institutions with no historically derived meaning, having been convicted for activities that they would not themselves consider offences”.
Colonial prison differed from its counterpart in Europe. “The body and pain are not the ultimate objects of … punitive action,” wrote Michel Foucault in his book, Discipline and Punish, which details the long-term changes in the focus of European penology. However, according to Bernault, “while the Western penitentiary reframed free individuals as equal citizens and legal subjects, the colonial prison primarily construed Africans as objects of power”. It was about the exercise of power over them and ideas like rehabilitation of offenders that were being propounded in the West by the prison reform movement.
As Branch notes, from the beginning, Kenyan prisons were deemed by critics to be “insufficiently harsh”. Incarceration was not just about punishment; it was also a means to extract labour and resources for the colonial state. Prisoners were forced to work on public projects and penal labour was considered a vital part of the colonial economy. This reliance on prison labour contributed to a preference for jailing people.
In his testimony to the Bushe Commission, set up in 1933 to look into the Kenyan justice system following a series of scandalous incidents, Sydney Hubert La Fontaine, the Ukamba Province Provincial Commissioner, demonstrated the preference for jailing people. He admitted that he would rarely entertain alternatives to putting natives in prison for a first offence, nor give them time to pay fines.
Read also: Careers at US Embassy Kenya
Another incident related by British anti-imperialist Norman Leys in his book, A Last Chance for Kenya, demonstrates the connivance of colonial authorities in locking up Africans they knew to be innocent. He tells the story of how one District Officer was shocked, upon taking up a fresh appointment, to discover that white settlers were in the habit of getting his predecessor to imprison and punish their less efficient workers for up to 6 months with hard labour, even though the workers had actually committed no crime!
It is also important to note that settlers were large beneficiaries of the forced labour of convicts on their farms, which would establish a precedent for future African elites.
Such attitudes, however, inevitably ran up against the limitations of the penal system, which was severely undermanned and under-resourced. By the early 1930s, according to Branch, the Prisons Department employed just 20 Europeans (mainly based in Nairobi) and over 400 Africans. By comparison, the total number of persons they were expected to watch over in the course of 1930 was over 21,000.
Pay was also pretty poor and a job in the prison service was the preserve of those without other options and so staff turnover was high. Not only were the prisons poorly funded, but they relied on the free labour of inmates to keep them running and to finance a significant part of their operations.
Further, prison facilities and especially the detention camps that had been introduced in 1926 to cater for petty offenders in a vain attempt to ease overcrowding, were ramshackle affairs. In general, they tended to be run on the terms of the incarcerated rather than the warders.
Read also: The Rise of Strip Clubs
In many camps, there was little segregation of the prison community from the rest of society, with inmates in some cases free to come and go as they pleased, which made for some rare comical moments. For example, Branch relates an instance where a magistrate in Mombasa, while inspecting a detention camp, came across an inmate he had sentenced there earlier in the day “having tea with his wife and children just inside the wire”.
However, these momentary escapes perhaps did not make much of a difference as life outside the prison had increasingly come to mirror the conditions within it. The prison was just a part of the system for enforcing this brutal racist hierarchy, other elements of which included public floggings and extortionate fines.
The predations and impositions of the colonial state and the resentment they evoked were on the rise, culminating in the outbreak of the Mau Mau uprising in 1952. This would fundamentally change the already brutal Kenya prison system for the worse as tens of thousands of Mau Mau detainees and convicts flooded the system, upending the established hierarchies within it, as well as cementing the place of the prison within the popular imagination as one of physical desecration and social death.
Post-Independence Era: Continued Abuses and the Nyayo Chambers
Moi, Kenya’s longest-serving president, had seen off a coup attempt by a section of the armed forces in 1982. Afterwards he cracked down hard, introducing excessive policing and human rights abuses and passing laws to suppress political freedom. During the height of the crackdown between 1986 and 1992, more than 150 pro-democracy activists were detained and tortured in the Nyayo cells.
The 56 days that Patrick Onyango spent in Kenya’s dark, damp Nyayo House torture chambers remain clear in his mind. It was three decades ago that Onyango, now 66, knew that his opposition to the autocratic rule of Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, was to be punished when uniformed policemen seized him in the middle of a class he was teaching in Kisumu, the port city in western Kenya, bundling him on to a helicopter and whisking him to the capital, Nairobi.
There he was shuttled from one prison cell to another for nearly a week, he says, before being blindfolded and taken through a narrow tunnel to the cells of the infamous Nyayo torture chambers. Onyango was made to undress, and then beaten and stabbed. Denied food and water in his cell for nearly two weeks, he drank his own urine to survive. “I was subjected to all kinds of torture - it was very cruel, very inhumane,” says Onyango, who angered the Moi regime for his student activism against one-party rule in the early 1980s.
Survivors, who chronicled their experiences in the book We Lived to Tell, have recounted how chamber interrogators would drive needles into their nails, and kick, squeeze or burn their genitals with cigarette butts. Some were killed during the interrogation, and those who survived were released after coerced confessions or imprisoned on charges of sedition and treason.
Onyango was detained at the chambers for nearly two months and then imprisoned for three years in a maximum-security prison. The long and gruelling weeks he spent under interrogation are now a trauma he can talk about after years of psychological support from a survivors’ network. He recalls how guards brought his fiancee to the cell, forcing her to watch as they tortured and humiliated him. Afterwards she was gang-raped in the next room. He found out after his release from prison that she had become pregnant from the abuse and had taken her own life.
“She was not part of [the activism for democracy] but paid the ultimate price,” says Onyango. “The chiefs also sent word to my parents that I was dead; [they] were traumatised. My mum got hypertension after I was taken, and while I was fortunate enough to find her after my release, that’s what killed her.
Every February since, Onyango and other survivors have returned to visit the cells in an act of remembrance with members of the public who want to know more about the atrocities. This dark chapter of Kenya’s history is barely taught in schools and the old interrogation cells in the basement of a multi-storey immigration centre are classified as a “protected area” that can only be accessed with permission from the security services and Nairobi officials.
The case, filed before Nairobi courts by four survivors of torture, the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) and the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), seeks to overturn laws that limit access to the chambers. The survivors are demanding that the area be converted into a national monument open to the Kenyan public, as recommended in 2011 by the country’s truth, justice and reconciliation commission, a body formed after Kenya’s 2007-08 post-election violence to help resolve historical injustices.
“There is no political goodwill from past and current governments to address historical state violations,” says Martin Mavenjina, a senior adviser for transitional justice at the KHRC. The rights group has recorded more than 100 torture lawsuits against the state over the years, filed by survivors and victims’ families. Its lawyers say that while many cases were successful on their merits, a number of victims have not received compensation to date.
“That is the reason why we want that place to be made a museum. It should be a reminder of what can happen when despotism takes centre stage in a country.
The derelict Nyayo torture chambers, where Patrick Onyango was held for nearly two months.
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison is a prison in Nairobi, Kenya. The prison is within Kasarani District, bordering Kiambu County. Many executions have been carried out in Kamiti. Mau Mau rebel leader Dedan Kimathi was hanged by the British colonial administration on 18 February 1957. Hezekiah Ochuka and Pancras Oteyo Okumu were executed there on 17 May 1987.
Kenya's prisons are infamous for poor conditions and inhumane treatment, although the situation has improved slightly during Mwai Kibaki's government since 2002 and some prisoners on death row have been released. There is still no reliable water supply, with over 200 prisoners hauling buckets of water around daily. The prison was built for 1400 prisoners, and it now houses over 3600 in poor living conditions.
Kirugumi wa Wanjuki was the longest serving and to date last hangman at Kamiti.
Contemporary Prison Conditions in Kenya
The prison system in Kenya is one of the worst prison systems in the world. Prison conditions are gruesome. Hygiene is very low and violence is very high among inmates. Starvation and a lack of medical care are also very common throughout prisons in Kenya.
Within the prison system in Kenya, inmates have to endure cruel and horrible conditions. The majority of inmates that are in prison suffering from these gruesome conditions are poor. According to Prison Insider, “A study on death-row convicts found that poor and uneducated Kenyans are languishing in prison for either robbery with violence or murder.” Whether on death row or not, poor Kenyans are living in degrading prison conditions just because they are poor.
Kenyans that are poor end up in prison because the police purposely target them. Police officers in Kenya have a history of abusing their power and harassing poor and marginalized people. Since these individuals are very poor, they cannot bribe police officers to release them and they cannot defend themselves due to a lack of legal knowledge. They also cannot hire an attorney so their only option is to go to jail and live in conditions that are inhumane.
Poor inmates in prison have to “wallow in misery and want.” While on the other hand, inmates with money can have self-contained cells with amenities such as flushable toilets and TVs with satellites. Omar Ismael, who is 64 years old and served nine years at Manyani prison, explained that close to 100 inmates share one bathroom and one toilet. Inmates in prison usually end up catching diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia as well as scabies and diarrhea due to how unsanitary things are.
Terrible conditions within prisons also consist of overcrowding which is a result of poor infrastructure. Aging buildings and inadequate cells are also part of the problem when it comes to harsh prison conditions. In western Kakamega prison, inmates have gone five years with no clean running water. Clean water for drinking and showering was not available to inmates. Since inmates didn’t have access to clean water, their poor diets got worse. Water shortages in this prison also led to toilet clogging and overflowing.
Females that commit crimes often have a background of poverty. Poverty forces women to commit crimes because they have to find a way to support their families. Women in certain countries are often imprisoned for offenses such as prostitution and adultery which are criminalized and called status offenses.
Women that are imprisoned in Kenya often face two of the worst prison conditions which are a lack of sanitation and a lack of proper hygiene products. In May 2020, the Kenya Prisons Service stopped all visits to prisons in order to control the spread of COVID-19. In Korinda Prison, the suspension of all visits severely impacted more than 100 women because these visits supplied women with the necessary hygiene and sanitation products from family members and organizations. Mary Makokha, who is executive director of Busia-based organization REEP, told NATION “They had no panties, no sanitary towels. Women were walking around with blood running down their legs.”
Efforts to Improve Prison Conditions
Despite cruel and inhumane prison conditions plaguing inmates in various prisons across Kenya, some are taking measures to improve and fix conditions. Nestle Kenya and the Rotary International District 9212 collaborated with National Business Compact on COVID-19 to improve hygiene conditions in prisons through Nairobi. This collaboration allowed the Kenya Prisons Service to administer 20,000 liters of water a day along with soap and 18 hand washing stations. The National Business Compact on COVID-19 donated soap and hand washing stations to promote and allow inmates to wash their hands more often.
Unfortunately, prison conditions in Kenya are very grim. Inmates that are poor have to endure a lack of hygiene and sanitation which is not safe at all, especially during a deadly pandemic.
Inside Nyayo House Torture Chambers :Tour The Torture Capital of Kenya...
Popular articles:
tags: #Kenya
