The Agora Center for Research recently released a report documenting brutal conditions in Uganda's prisons, where thousands of prisoners are forced into unpaid labor and experience violence and degradation. This blog by Aaron Steinberg and Agather Atuhaire examines how Uganda's prison system, despite more than six decades of political independence, continues to function according to its original colonial design: not as a site for rehabilitation, but as a mechanism for labor extraction and state control.
Before European colonization, incarceration as punishment was largely unknown across Africa. Different Ugandan ethnic groups practiced restorative justice systems focused on reconciliation between parties, with the eventual reintegration of the offender back into the community. The Acholi people used Mato Oput – a ceremony involving voluntary confession, clan negotiations, and communal meals that sealed reconciliation. The Ankole had Kyoto, where the conflicting parties and community members gathered around a fireplace to discuss how to resolve the issue. The Baganda practiced Kutawulula, where witnesses to the conflict brought families together for mediated discussions. These systems, in Uganda and across much of Africa, prioritized compensation to victims and restoration of community harmony over individual punishment.
The British prison system, introduced as part of their "civilizing mission," had a fundamentally different purpose. The 1903 Prisons Ordinance established the Uganda Prison Service with a strict hierarchy mirroring racial segregation: British officers in senior positions, Asians in clerical roles, and Ugandans at the bottom. By the 1930s, there were approximately 300 penal institutions across Uganda.
Independence Without Liberation
Following independence in 1962, the Obote administration released 3,500 prisoners to symbolize a break from colonial rule. However, as historian Katherine Bruce-Lockhart documents in her research on prisoner releases in postcolonial Uganda, leaders "who had previously denounced colonial prisons as violent and racist instruments of European imperialism, paradoxically redeployed mass detention as an integral arm of the new state."
The infrastructure remained unchanged: the same buildings, uniforms, policies, and critically, the same economic logic. Ugandan feminist researcher Jackline Kemigisa argues that the postcolonial government "did not intend to discontinue structural anti-Blackness entrenched through the law, prisons, borders, military, and police." This represents what scholars term "Africanization without democratization”: the personnel changed, but colonial structures persisted.
According to Human Rights Watch's 2011 report, thousands of Ugandan prisoners are forced to engage in hard labor, cultivating crops and clearing fields under oppressive conditions. The 2025 Agora report documents that prisoners work up to nine hours daily, seven days per week, often experiencing brutal beatings for working too slowly, claiming illness, or straightening their backs to stretch. When questioned about brutal treatment of prisoners, Senior Commissioner Frank Baine stated it was simply "part of the culture in prison.”
The economic motivations behind this system are explicit. Prison authorities receive minimal funding from the central government, creating perverse incentives to maintain high prisoner populations and exploit their labor. As one prison officer stated to Human Rights Watch: "From the working arrangement, we use the money [the prison receives for private work]; if it wasn't there, then we wouldn't be surviving." Private landowners hire prisoners at rates of 2,500 to 3,500 Ugandan shillings (approximately $1.00 to $1.50) per head per day – significantly below the 7,000 to 10,000 shillings ($3.00 to $4.25) that free workers earn for comparable work.
A report by the Ugandan non-profit Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum found that Ugandan police frequently carry out sweeps in Kampala slums under the auspices of “idle and disorderly” laws, contributing to the overcrowding of prisons. This practice echoes British carceral practices where vague offenses like "vagrancy" helped institutionalize the unemployed.
According to Agora’s report, 47% of the prison population are on remand (awaiting trial and presumed innocent under law), with average detention periods of 10.6 months before trial, extending to 25.5 months for High Court cases. Article 25(2) of Uganda's Constitution explicitly prohibits forced labor, yet the Agora report documented that remand prisoners are routinely made to provide labor to prison farms and farms of private individuals.
Rehabilitation in Name Only
The Prisons Act of 2006 establishes rehabilitation and reintegration as core functions of the Uganda Prisons Service. Section 56(e) explicitly states that prisoners are entitled to "meaningful remunerated employment." Yet as the Agora report documents, educational and vocational programs remain virtually nonexistent in most facilities. Instead, prisoners perform forced, unpaid, or grossly underpaid labor focused on profit instead of transferable skills for life after release. The severe overcrowding documented by Agora (365.3% of intended capacity) further ensures that rehabilitation efforts remain impossible. This failure is not administrative incompetence but reflects deliberate policy choices to warehouse people deemed expendable by the state.
Uganda's prison system is one of many stark indicators in Uganda, and across the postcolonial world, that political independence does not dismantle colonial structures. True transformation demands questioning why a system designed for exploitation and control during colonial rule continues to operate on the same fundamental logic today. Until Uganda addresses this structural continuity, its prisons will function as they were originally designed: not as spaces for rehabilitation, but as sites for labor extraction and state control. The recommendations outlined in Agora’s report are a first step toward confronting the Ugandan prison’s colonial legacy and meaningful reform.
Agather Atuhaire is a Ugandan lawyer, journalist, digital activist, and 2024 laureate of the International Women of Courage Award describes work using the digital space to expose corruption and advocate for social justice. Agather is Executive Team Leader at Agora Center for Research
Aaron Steinberg is a human rights activist based in the United States. He is a Non Resident Fellow at Agora Center for Research and Communication Director for Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. Previously he worked at the World Peace Foundation, Global Labor Justice and the Council of Foreign Relations.
The Agora Center for Research is an independent research organization dedicated to documenting human rights violations and advocating for systemic reform in Uganda. This blog extends findings from Agora's #SpotlightOnPrisonsUg report, which documented conditions across Ugandan prisons and brought unprecedented public attention to the violent continuation of colonial structures of control and exploitation within the country's correctional system. To learn more about prison conditions in Uganda and support reform efforts, read the full #SpotlightOnPrisonsUg report from the Agora Center for Research.