Introduction

In the popular imagination, humanitarianism is concerned with crisis – refugees fleeing, guns firing, or earthquakes striking. But some of the oldest forms of humanitarian action concern hidden yet protracted forms of violence against vulnerable populations. While the preoccupation of the founding figure of the contemporary humanitarian industry, Henry Dunant, with humanitarianism is typically credited to his experiences of the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, it is not unremarkable that his youth was spent conducting visits to prisons and other places of oppression in Geneva, Switzerland.¹Hart, E. (1953). Man Born to Live: Life and Work of Henry Dunant, Founder of the Red Cross. Gollancz, 23-24. Indeed, the prison remains a preoccupation of the ICRC and other humanitarian organizations globally. As an institution, the violence and suffering that suffuse prisons across the world thus reflects a certain ambiguity in the raison d’etre of humanitarianism. While frequently preoccupied with seemingly unexpected forms of crisis, the existence of the permanent crisis of the prison underscores the limits of organized humanitarian efforts to effect structural change.

The violence of the prison is – of course – not uniformly felt. Those who enter its walls are most often marked by racial, political, and social factors, whether in the United States of America, Brazil, France, Colombia, China, the Congo, or anywhere else. To be poor is to be more likely to enter prison.²Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh. Punishment & society, 3(1), 95-133. To be a racial minority is to be more likely to enter prison.³Sudbury, J. (2014). Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex. Routledge. To be a political ‘undesirable’ is to be more likely to enter prison. Moreover, the modern prison is equally a colonial institution – refined by the ‘great reformers’ of European society – who originally saw prison walls, cells, and solitary confinement as a way of escaping the more obviously brutally violent punishments that preceded confinement.⁴Cooper, R. A. (1981). Jeremy Bentham, Elizabeth Fry, and English Prison Reform. Journal of the History of Ideas, 42(4), 675-690. Indeed, the invention of the prison, for some, was itself a ‘humanitarian’ endeavour, albeit one that was then exported to the colonies in the form of slave camps and a politics of racial suprematicism.⁵Gibson, M. (2011). Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison. The American Historical Review, 116(4), 1040-1063

Detention in prison, or other settings, becomes an even more pressing concern in times of war, conflict, or political instability. Yet, despite the protected status of detainees, the prohibition of torture, and other mechanisms having been enshrined in international humanitarian and human rights law since their inception, detainees during conflict are at severe risk of torture, degrading treatment, abuse, death, and other violence.⁶See https://www.icrc.org/en/law-and-policy/detention This makes questions about how to design against violence in detention ever more relevant for humanitarian actors across the world. Nonetheless, and despite continued awareness of these difficulties, prisons, detention centres, and other places of confinement remain within a perpetual crisis to this date.

As all of this makes clear, the prison is not a natural space. It is a political space. At the same time, that politics is very literally constructed by concrete, steel, and technology: a set of design parameters that express violence and oppression in wider society. A prison is designed to stage, to pre-structure, to constrain the future possibilities of a society and political system. One sees this in the intense effort that state (and other) authorities have placed historically on elaborating the structural, technological, and social architectures of prisons. Inversely, one sees this in the degree of attention that everyday, rather than crisis-orientated, humanitarian actors place on reforming prison politics. To understand the design of carceral spaces is thus to understand the ways in which violence is designed-in to the world.

Research Streams

1. Co-Designing Mental Health and Detention

Across the world, prisoners exhibit abnormally high levels of mental health problems – including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and substance abuse, paranoid schizophrenia, and beyond.⁸Favril, L., Rich, J. D., Hard, J., & Fazel, S. (2024). Mental and physical health morbidity among people in prisons: an umbrella review. The Lancet Public Health, 9(4), e250-e260. and Ndindeng, A. N. (2024). Mental health and well-being in prisons and places of detention. International Journal of Prison Health. These conditions increase the risk of recidivism once prisoners leave the detention system, the presence of violence within detention facilities themselves, vulnerability to physical illness, intimate partner violence outside prison, and the likelihood of engaging in further criminality or armed conflict (in some cases) outside prisons.⁹Rice, S. M., Baker, D. G., Purcell, R., & Chanen, A. (2024). Offending behaviour and mental ill-health among young people: Reducing recidivism requires integration with youth mental health care. Journal of Global Health, 14, 03001.Udedi, M., Stockton, M. A., Kulisewa, K., Hosseinipour, M. C., Gaynes, B. N., Mphonda, S. M., … & Pence, B. W. (2018). Integrating depression management into HIV primary care in central Malawi: the implementation of a pilot capacity building program. BMC health services research, 18, 1-12. Udedi, M., Pence, B., Kauye, F., & Muula, A. S. (2018). The effect of depression management on diabetes and hypertension outcomes in low-and middle-income countries: a systematic review protocol. Systematic Reviews, 7, 1-5.Prakash, P., Khurana, P., Gupta, M., Madabushi, J. S., & PRAKASH, P. (2024). Behind Prison Walls: Critical Overview of the Mental Health Trajectories of Children Living With Incarcerated Mothers. Cureus, 16(7). Ogunlowo, A., & Baldwin, D. S. (2024). The mental health of displaced persons. Medicine, 52(8), 455.

Despite all this, mental health screening and diagnosis – let alone treatment – is severely limited in carceral settings for two main reasons. First, across the world, longstanding perceptions of detention as serving a punitive purpose reduces political, institutional, and public will to address the mental health conditions of those in detention.¹⁰Haney, C. (2017). “Madness” and penal confinement: Some observations on mental illness and prison pain. Punishment & Society, 19(3), 310-326. Okasha, A. (2004). Mental patients in prisons: punishment versus treatment?. World Psychiatry, 3(1), 1. Kupers, T. A. (2005). Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison. Journal of clinical psychology, 61(6), 713-724. Indeed, historically, the prison has developed as one of the most ‘designed’ spaces in contemporary society, augmented in its capacity to inflict violence both physical and psychological on those held within its walls. Architects, engineers, politicians, and others have designed violence into the prison.¹¹Austin, J. L. (2020). The Poetry of Moans and Sighs: Designs for and against Evil. Frame: Journal of Literary Studies 34 (1). Antonelli, P. (2020). Design and Violence. Marg, A Magazine of the Arts, 71(4), 94-102. How can one design against violence in a space designed for violence? When both the political and material-technological cards are stacked against intervention? Second, in low and middle-income countries resources for diagnosing and treating mental health conditions are very limited even outside prisons themselves. In such a context, the idea of prioritizing the mental health of detainees, or providing medical or psychosocial support can seem an irrelevance – an unnecessary luxury.¹²Smith, A., Ogunwale, A., Moura, H. F., Bhugra, D., Ventriglio, A., & Liebrenz, M. (2024). Mental health and justice beyond borders: Global crises, sociopolitical determinants, and contemporary practices in forensic psychiatry. International Review of Psychiatry, 36 (7), 784–793. Saraceno, B., van Ommeren, M., Batniji, R., Cohen, A., Gureje, O., Mahoney, J., … & Underhill, C. (2007). Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet, 370(9593), 1164-1174.

Despite these obstacles, sustained efforts are now emerging to think-through the re-design of mental health programming in carceral settings across the world. Central to this is the rise of technological interventions into mental health and psychosocial support services (MHPSS), including in humanitarian contexts.¹³See, for example, the resources available on the Red Cross and Red Crescent’s Digital MHPSS Focus Area page here: https://mhpsshub.org/about-us/focus-areas/digital-mental-health-and-psychosocial-support-mhpss/. This encompasses a focus on digital MHPSS provision in low or middle income contexts where “low threshold” services are required to improve screening, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. The hope is that the use of digital and other computational tools may assist in overcoming the severe lack of trained mental health and psychosocial support staff in contexts like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Colombia. Variously, it is hoped that technologies deployed in carceral contexts may provide remote forms of treatment for mental health disorders, increase the screening capacity of detention institutions, assist medical staff through clinical decision support systems, and more. Much of this work has been motivated by the World Health Organisation’s Countdown for Global Mental Health 2030 program, something increasingly integrated into the foci of humanitarian and development agencies.

Can new technologies truly play a positive role in screening for, diagnosing, and treating mental health in detention settings, however? HUD is exploring this design question as part of its development engineering activities. In particular, this research stream focuses on the following questions:

• What potential benefits do digital clinial decision support systems have in assisting mental health triage, screening, and treatment in low and middle income contexts?
• What potential risks do such support systems have in such contexts, ranging from the real risk of cementing already present forms of technocolonialism¹⁴Madianou, M. (2019). Technocolonialism: Digital innovation and data practices in the humanitarian response to refugee crises. Social media+ society, 5(3); Madianou, M. (2024). Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful. John Wiley & Sons., through to more pragmatic concerns including abuse by authorities, misdiagnosis, and beyond?
• How can such technologies fit with global contexts that are often highly critical of the pharmacological and Eurocentric understandings of mental health?
• Would it be preferable to tackle the socio-political drivers, including armed conflict, extreme poverty, and other factors underlying the global mental health crisis, rather than turning to technological interventions?

2. Lived experiences of detention

Sara¹⁵All names, dates, places, and details may have been changed to preserve anonymity. is a young woman, 30 years old, living in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She smiles a lot, blows kisses, makes a lot of jokes. The men around her seem most often quieter. She describes herself as a child of the streets. She has two children, but they live with her parents. Why? Because she is now the chief of a street gang called Bébé d’amour. For the government, she is a ‘Kuluna.’ Or, as she prefers, in the Lingala-English mix: a Yankee (the name is, surely, not irrelevant). Her children live with her parents so she can ‘find something’ to help her children go to school.

One day, we pick up Sara in an area of the city notorious for street crime and drive to a nearby space where we can chat outside the incessant noise of Kinshasa’s streets. Sara is not very talkative today, which is unusual – she has a serious face, and isn’t telling the jokes she normally does. A week prior, she was already a few beers into her morning: it was her birthday. Why not? Eventually, the explanation emerges – the morning before today, police from outside the commune had arrived at her makeshift stand where she sells alcohol on the street. Without any real explanation, they confiscate her stock, around 80’000 Congolese Francs worth of alcohol- around 30 USD. She travelled, at her own expense, to the depot where her goods were being stored to reclaim them. But the police had already drunk most of the alcohol they had ‘confiscated.’ Why not? I ask Sara what she thinks about the police, if she has any fear when they come around. She tuts and replies: “No.”

I ask why, and she replies: “Because of what happened to me in prison.”

Sara only became the chief of Bébé d’amour after she visited prison. Before that, she was on the streets, but not a criminal. Yet she was arrested one year after she discovered an affair between her husband and a friend, whom she attacked with a knife. Her husband called the police, and she threaded through the various ‘justice’ systems that exist in Kinshasa, before being transferred to Makala central prison. On arrival at Makala, Sara was abused by the prison staff in many ways. One form of abuse was among the most common for new detainees: she was forced to clean the septic tanks of the prison, with her bare hands, without gloves or tools.

During all this, Sara was pregnant. When she went into labour she was briefly transferred to the hospital that serves the central prison, where she gave birth to a child called Faith. Not more than six hours later she was back in the prison, with her baby, where she stayed for six years. During this time, she had some kind of luck. The wife of the director of the prison took pity on her, and organised for her child to go to school. At seven in the morning, the child would be picked up from the prison and attend school, before returning back to her mother in the afternoon. But Faith also grew up in prison.

After six years, Sara left prison, gave Faith to her parents, and became chief of the street gang Bébé d’amour.

After some hesitation, I ask: “Does Faith remember anything about growing up in prison?”

“Yes.”¹⁶Interview with ‘Sara’ (all names changed), November 2024.

Sara’s story is not unusual. The prison system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is, undoubtedly, among the worst in the world. Examples like the forced cleaning of septic tanks by detainees, without any protection, reveal not only the violence of prison life but also its infrastructural poverty. Indeed, at almost every level, prisons in the Congo lack what is elsewhere taken for granted – clean water, adequate nutrition, health facilities, legal representation, record keeping, recreation facilities, security, electricity – even beds, even chairs. All are more or less absent. And babies, children, men, and women must suffer through those absences. In that context, HUD’s Congo-based team, are looking at the material, social, and political design of these spaces differently.

Despite the extreme material poverty of prisons in the Congo, a mixture of prisoners themselves, low-level authorities, humanitarian organizations, civil society, human rights defenders, and others design ‘bricolaged’ forms of life, protection, and possibility in prison. These ‘humanitarian’ designs are a mix of the low and the high-tech. Echoing prison systems elsewhere, mobile phones are present in these facilities, smuggled in with a little payment here or there. Detainees watch TikTok reels, yes. But they also communicate with a network of lawyers and civil society members outside the prison walls, denouncing abuses and particularly severe cases of illness or distress. Informal ‘restaurants’ or systems for cooking, bypassing the exceptionally poor food officially provided, are established in the prison. An entire internal hierarchy of authority is produced, mirroring that outside, to maintain order in the absence of state authority. Doctors detained in prison remain doctors inside prison. And so forth. To make life possible: people improvise.

As part of its focus on prisons and detention, HUD has begun by un-boxing these realities of the design of carceral space – the informal, hidden, bricolaged, and improvised. It does so through a series of extended ethnographic interviews and life story-telling techniques with former detainees. The reality of these lived experiences allows us to move beyond formal – legal, humanitarian political, institutional, etc. – descriptions of how carceral facilities operate. Instead, a true material, social, and aesthetic understand of the design of these spaces is revealed, one that is critical to understand for any future humanitarian design of prisons to be possible.

3. Cartographies of Prison Space

Despite centuries of effort by architects, planners, and authorities to design the ‘perfect’ prison – one that disciplines, purifies (‘rehabilitates’), and controls detainees – those held within prison walls have always resisted.¹⁷Norman, J. M. (2021). The Palestinian prisoners movement: Resistance and disobedience. Routledge., Feitlowitz, M. (1998). A lexicon of terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Resistance here is not necessarily conscious or active. It refers to the fundamental human instinct to adapt to circumstances – to push back against attempts at control. For better or worse, prison design thus always comes unstuck the moment detainees, guards, administrative staff, and politicians enter its walls. How this occurs varies. In some contexts, steel and concrete become excessively ‘vicious’ – transforming the simplest objects into agents of pain. Elsewhere, steel and concrete seem to partially meld away – allowing a kind of mirror of life outside to continue within the prison walls. But whatever the case, the best laid plans of architects and engineers are never exactly realised in practice.

How then do we see the reality of prison space? In this research stream, HUD’s Congo-based team are mapping the spatial experiences of former detainees in Congolese prisons. After a series of ethnographic interviews with interlocutors (see above), participatory mapping techniques are being deployed to sketch the subjective – yet patterned – experiences of detainees. Where do they experience violence? Where do they feel safe? Where are prison staff present? Where are they absent? What forms of resistance are deployed by detainees? By authorities? What technologies are present or absent within prison spaces? Answering questions such as these through the visual mapping of carceral space allows us to understand the non-fixity of the design of prison or detention space – how it escapes plans laid for good or for bad. In doing so, we can better un-black-box the prison as a space and open avenues for its potential problematization and re-design.

These visual mappings of confinement do not stop, however, at the prison gates. We are extending their contours to include the full ‘ecology‘ of violence, confinement, and social dynamics in, and beyond, the Congo. For example, those experiencing mental health problems in the Congo are frequently referred directly to the police – where they are often detained. Sometimes sent directly to prison. What do instances like this do to the landscape of confinement? How do they demonstrate intersecting lines of violence between different forms of social and political discipline? To explore these questions, this mapping of the literal space of the prison is being extended to the experiences of family members of those detained, medical staff who treat detainees, the lives of guards and otehr prison staff themselves, and so forth. In doing so, we aim to produce a map of the ecology of confinement in the Congo that can act as a guide to making small, yet important, changes do its design.

Video and still images from a series of participatory visual cartographic exercise mapping the personal spatial experience of detention in Kinshasa central prison (Makala).

4. Sousveillance in detention

Surveillance technologies involve the ‘few’ watching the ‘many.’ Cameras affixed to buildings peer down on the public at large, observed by police officials and the state. In humanitarian action, this logic repeats itself: observers watch through satellites, remote sensing equipment, or through big data-enabled tools to predict the next crisis. Sites of humanitarian crisis are surveilled from a distance, with the human beings that inhabit those spaces thus reduced to disembodied pixels or figures on a spreadsheet.¹⁸Rothe, D., Fröhlich, C., & Rodriguez Lopez, J. M. (2021). Digital humanitarianism and the visual politics of the refugee camp:(Un) seeing control. International Political Sociology, 15(1), 41-62. Outside humanitarianism as it is usually understood, this problem has long been recognized and a mix of academics, activists, and technologists have sought to instead develop ‘sousveillance’ technologies.¹⁹See Thomsen, F. K. (2019). The concepts of surveillance and sousveillance: A critical analysis. Social Science Information, 58(4), 701-713. and Mann, S., Nolan, J., & Wellman, B. (2003). Sousveillance: Inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments. Surveillance & society, 1(3), 331-355. A sous- (‘under’) veillance technology hopes to invert the usual gaze of sur- (‘over’) veillance technology by using visual technologies (cameras, satellites, machine vision algorithms) to observe centres of political power, and hold them accountable.

In this sub-project, Jonathan Luke Austin explores how the principles of sousveillance might be applied to humanitarian settings. Examples of such interventions arleady exist. The eyeWitness to Atrocities organisation based in the United Kingdom has developed the eyeWitness app, a special platform designed to allow visual footage of atrocities to captured with accompanying meta-data and uploaded to a secure server so as to create a “traceable chain of custody [that] makes it possible for… [such] footage to be inserted as evidence in a trial.”²⁰See https://www.eyewitness.global/. In this work eyeWitness to Atrocities focuses the gaze of visual recording technologies on those who commit violence and works to minimize the capacity of those actors to deny the veracity of such footage.

Extending this use of sousveillance technologies to other purposes has provided difficult, however. Examples like the eyeWitness app are post-hoc deployments of technology designed to preserve evidence and deploy that evidence for legal restitution. Such acts are deeply important in how they reverse the gaze of legal-political power, forcing justice where it might not otherwise exist. But they do not shift the conditions that make acts of violence possible – they do not prevent violence.²¹Austin, J. L. (2019). Towards an international political ergonomics. European Journal of International Relations, 25(4), 979-1006. Yet there are examples of sousveillance technologies that attempt to achieve just that. Some are very old, and very basic. The legal mandating of audio and video recording in police interrogations, for example, serves both to record the words of detainees and to monitor the behaviour of interrogators. The introduction of body cameras to police forces is also intended to serve the same purpose. While such technologies are in no way a panacea to violence, as the evidence base shows, one can see their utility by asking a simple question: If you, the reader of these words, was detained, wouldn’t you (in most cases) prefer the actions of the detaining authorities be recorded?

In this research stream, the possibility of developing technological solutions that would allow the more widespread deployment of such pragmatic sousveillance devices to prison and detention settings are being explored. Challenges include creating systems that are low-power, autonomous, and fit the security needs of various state authorities to be accepted. Potential avenues being explored include the use of ‘action-recognition’ algorithims that can automatically detect abuse and torture in detention through computational tools, as well as recent developments in battery and storage technologies. While still a speculative intervention at this stage, the ultimate goal of this research stream is to imagine subversive technologies that improve humanitarian conditions by shifting the behaviour of state agents themselves.

An animated video of an ‘action recognition’ algorithm designed to detect violence, and a satellite image of the Congo river.