Health provision and health professional roles under compromised circumstances: Lessons from Sierra Leone’s prisons

Abstract

This article adds to a growing body of empirical work on prisons in the global south. It reports on a survey into prison health provision in Sierra Leone, West Africa conducted by a local non-governmental organization (Prison Watch – Sierra Leone). Taking the survey results as the point of departure and engaging with the limited literature on prison health provision in the South we discuss the role of health professionals in preventing violence in prisons, suggesting that, under compromised circumstances where a punitive penal ethos often subverts good intentions and appeals to professionalism, advocacy for prisoner health and torture prevention initiatives must be broad-based and include a more radical questioning of the foundations of the penal apparatus. Such circumstances call for a more critical interrogation of dominant forms of penality and generic modes of intervention than has hitherto been the case.