The frailties of prisons in post-colonial Sudan: from rehabilitation to retribution, 1956–1989.

This article examines the slow eclipse of the rehabilitative ideal within the Sudanese prison system in the period from independence in 1956 till the removal of the third parliamentary regime in 1989. It contends that Jacfar Numayri's ‘Islamization’ of the criminal and penal system in 1983, which has been interpreted by some as an act of religious revival aiming to replace a series of externally imposed and European laws, cannot be understood purely in cultural terms. It will demonstrate that the Sudanese prison professionals of the post-colonial era pursued rehabilitative ideals with greater enthusiasm than their colonial predecessors. However, they were hampered by the limited resources offered to them by a government that became increasingly less interested in infrastructural social control and more concerned with exercising direct physical violence against both political and non-political transgessors of the state's law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]