Prisons in Africa are an un-African institution. Nowhere in precolonial African societies were prisons used as a form of punishment; West Africa's measures for crime control were restorative and retributivist justice. European colonialists converted slave forts along the Atlantic coast into gaols or cachots (Bernault 2003). In postcolonial Africa, several notorious prisons were shut down, although a few countries opened separate prisons for women and …