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Penal Practice in Africa – Some Restrictions on the Possibility of Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

This article is based on the assumption that there are worldwide trends towards the more humane treatment of prisoners which have as their principal objective the reform of criminals. These trends are determined by the societies that have evolved them; they trends are not therefore characterised by African aims and they do not express themselves in African forms. So the possibilites of purely African innovation are limited.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

Page 448 note 1 My unpublished research on the flow of gossip during the 1966 disturbances in Uganda, when the Kabaka of Buganda was deposed, shows the widespread and highly coloured passage of information about violence, of which very little was verifiable.

Page 450 note 1 See Tanner, R. E. S., Three Studies in East African Criminology (Uppsala, 1970),Google Scholar table 7 – according to the Uganda Criminal Investigation Department, the following number of thieves were killed by crowds: 30 in 1961,65 in 1962, and 110 in 1963.

Page 451 note 1 As a First-Class Magistrate in Burma and Tanganyika, I sentenced according to contemporary local averages; but during visits to British courts in 1955 I found out that I had been averaging three times longer than comparable British sentences.

Page 454 note 1 The Minister of Home Affairs, according to The Nationalist (Dar es Salaam), 30 12 1967Google Scholar, ‘called upon all prisons in Tanzania to be fully self-reliant by 1968, and emphasised that not a cent of the taxpayers' money should be used for feeding, clothing, or maintaining the prisoners thenceforth’.