The future of prisons in Africa
by Prof Lukas Muntingh
  

Background
Prisons, Foucault said, is a despicable solution that we cannot seem to do without. If one is to really understand how despicable prisons are, a visit to many African prisons will show this with horrific clarity. There is of course a wide variety, ranging from the two high-tech immaculately clean privately operated prisons in South Africa to the guard with an AK 47 under a tree in South Sudan. There are some one million people imprisoned in Africa on any one day and in some countries the majority are unsentenced, often sitting for months if not years waiting for their trials to start and conclude. Conditions of detention are generally an affront to human dignity with hundreds of people crammed into buildings that were built by the colonial powers more than 50 years ago and are now wholly inadequate to accommodate the numbers sent there. Only South Africa has consistently built new prisons and renovated older ones over the last hundred years. African states have in general not invested in their prison systems, neither in the infrastructure nor in the staff, and continued using the buildings left by Britain, France and Portugal. In many states officials leave the day-to-day running of the prisons to the prisoners and keep a safe distance from the poorly ventilated cells. Read the full feature article.

Project Efiase: Funding Reform and Rehabilitation for a Better Future
by Solomon Appiah - Executive Director: Malku Institute of Technology

The challenges facing the Ghana Prisons Service are varied—most of which are interlinked and will require substantial amount of resources to solve. Fortunately, the current Prisons Service Council, previous Councils, and the Prisons Directorate have done a good job by identifying these challenges and, taken steps to develop a 10-year Strategic Development Plan to resolve them. In a spirit of continuity, the 6^th Prisons Service Council under the Chairmanship of Rev. Dr. Stephen Wengam has taken upon itself the task to raise funds for the implementation of the 10-year Strategic Development Plan. To do this, the Council will launch Project Efiase on June 26, 2015. Read the full feature article.
 

Designing for the Next Economic Transformation – Post Job Abundance
Clem Bezold presented on emerging views of next economic transformation at the World Future Society Conference in San Francisco on July 26th 2015.

Our nation is facing a host of challenges, including the futures of work and economy. As author and social thinker Jeremy Rifkin notes in his most recent book, we are seeing the birth of new economic order “whose life force is as different from market capitalism as the latter was from the feudal and medieval system from which it emerged.” Rifkin calls this the “zero marginal cost society.” As many sectors watch the cost of production fade to near zero, the prices for those products should make them nearly free. Read the full feature article.