Reforming Nigerian Prisons : Rehabilitating a Lsquo;DeviantRsquo; State

Analysis based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nigerian prisons and training institutions suggests that human rights training interventions can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate a deviant state, and as a form of global social control. External intervention strategies and the uncritical use of training as a universal solution are shown to have fundamental weaknesses in terms of their intended 'rehabilitative' aims and in relation to the realities of prison practice that they are confronted by. Such interventions are conceptualized as part of a global(izing) strategy that inadvertently reproduces conditions of domination by creating the appearance of a desire to 'help', whilst distracting attention from broader issues of global socio-political, economic and material (in)equality