The Society of Captives in an Ethiopian Prison

Much has been written about the challenges of prison life. Dominant themes—hearkening back to the classic work of Gresham Sykes in The Society of Captives—include the pains of confinement, prisoner-staff power dynamics, the argot roles that shed light on the values of the prisoner society, and the struggle to find and maintain a stable equilibrium. But our understanding tends to be rooted in research carried out in Europe and the United States. This account of an Ethiopian prison returns to Sykes’s work, with a view to adding some necessary nuance to contemporary debates about the carceral society