Author: km345

In April 2026, Incarceration Nations Network (INN) established by Baz Dreisinger convened a landmark global gathering in Cape Town, marking the international launch of the Global Freedom Consulting Agency (GF Consulting). This three-day event brought together policymakers, academics, and activists from more than 25 countries, signalling a paradigmatic shift in how expertise in criminal justice reform is conceptualised and mobilised. Launching the world’s first consulting agency composed of formerly incarcerated people from around the world, this event was the first of its kind. All of the consultants had taken part in the two-week Freedom Fellowship programme held at INN’s hub in Cape Town, which aims to bring people together from different countries who have been through prison systems and are now doing positive work. The Freedom Fellowship programme helps them to ‘connect, build, learn, be inspired, heal and feel joy.’ A team (Tammy Ayres, Lucy Evans, Elodie Laurent, Kellie Moss and Sonjah Stanley Niaah) from the Prisons, Drugs and Mental Health: An interdisciplinary global study attended this international interdisciplinary gathering on justice reform.

The Team and Nicholas Khan at the GFC event in St George’s Cathedral, South Africa

At its core, the event challenged dominant epistemologies of criminal justice by foregrounding lived experience as expertise. Although many of us put lived experiences at the forefront of our research, GF Consulting, formed from alumni of INN’s Global Freedom Fellowship, positions formerly incarcerated individuals not as subjects of reform but as architects of it. Over the past three years, the fellowship has trained leaders from 26 countries, many of whom now constitute a transnational network of consultants advising governments, institutions and civil society on issues ranging from education and reintegration to restorative justice.

Reframing Justice: From Punishment to Knowledge Production

The launch of GF Consulting represents a critical intervention in what scholars might describe as the politics of knowledge production within criminal justice systems. Traditionally, expertise has been monopolised by academics, legal professionals, policymakers and those in positions of power, often excluding those most directly affected by incarceration. This event disrupted that hierarchy.

At this event, lived experience was not treated as anecdotal but as analytical, strategic and indispensable for designing effective, context-sensitive interventions with real-world impact. This marks a shift that resonates with broader critical and decolonial frameworks, which interrogate whose knowledge counts and whose voices are systematically marginalised and excluded. By institutionalising formerly incarcerated leadership within a formal consulting structure, GF Consulting operationalises a counter-hegemonic epistemology; one that locates knowledge in embodied experience and social struggle, positioning lived experience at the centre of criminal justice solutions.

Education Not Incarceration: A Transnational Justice Movement

The event was not merely symbolic, but materially and geographically expansive. Hosted across historically and politically resonant sites, like St. George’s Cathedral and the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, the event embedded contemporary justice reform within South Africa’s longer histories of resistance and reconciliation. The final day of the event was held at the Brandvlei Correctional Centre where we were joined by Unisa educators, prison officers and incarcerated people undertaking higher education and training,

Event at Brandvlei Correctional Centre, South Africa – GF Scholars in Action and Unisa panel

The participation of global institutions, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), alongside partners such as the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, further underscored the international legitimacy and importance of this initiative. The presence of OHCHR’s regional representative for South Africa, Ms. Abigail Noko in the opening remarks signalled a recognition that justice reform is not solely a domestic policy issue but a global human rights imperative. Moreover, the diversity of participants and multi-lingual delivery highlighted the transnational nature of incarceration and its afterlives. Projects emerging from GF Consulting already demonstrate this global reach, including cross-border replication of intervention models and the development of international legal empowerment networks. We heard powerful and moving accounts from all of the Global Freedom Consultants at the event, some of who were unable to afford legal representation and had ended up being sentenced to death but studied law from their cells, organising and successfully arguing their appeal in the High Courts, and ultimately securing their own acquittal.

Lived Experience as Method and Praxis

What distinguished this event was not just the moving accounts and journeys of the Global Freedom Consultants, but their programmes, initiatives and drive to help and support others in similar positions. Panels, life stories, dialogues and performances, including spoken word poetry by Nicholas Khan, who wrote three poetry books in his cell (e.g. Nicko’s Ink), centred on what INN terms ‘justice innovation’ and ‘smart-on-crime’ approaches; frameworks that prioritise prevention, education and community-based solutions over punitive incarceration.

Importantly, the convening extended beyond conference spaces into sites of incarceration, such as Brandvlei Correctional Centre. Here discussions on education in prison foregrounded the transformative role of learning, aligning with South Africa’s longstanding histories, including the legacy of Nelson Mandela and his long walk to freedom, whose own intellectual formation during imprisonment continues to inform global imaginaries of resistance and rehabilitation. Other spaces included the Young Blood African Art Gallery, where the Writing on the Wall ‘pop-up art installation made from writings, drawings and notes by people in prison around the world’ was being exhibited.

Writing on the Wall Exhibition, at Young Blood African Art Gallery, South Africa

Critical Reflections

From an academic perspective, the launch of GF Consulting invites several critical reflections. Firstly, it challenges researchers and practitioners to reconsider methodological approaches that exclude justice-impacted voices and lived experiences. Even though there has been a growth in participatory action research and co-production, often this does not go far enough, and in some instances, ends up being tokenistic. What Baz Dreisinger has done is not only put lived experience at the centre but institutionalise it as a form of expertise reconfiguring the epistemic architecture of criminal justice work, thereby transforming it from a consultative add-on into a foundational driver of knowledge production, policy design, and justice innovation, which positions justice-impacted individuals as authoritative agents in the production of knowledge rather than its objects/subjects. Secondly, it foregrounds the need to move beyond reformist paradigms toward transformative justice frameworks that address structural inequalities underpinning mass incarceration. As many of us acknowledge in our work and as Baz  does in her award-winning book Incarceration Nations, criminalisation and incarceration reflects broader social inequalities and racial hierarchies that  can be traced back to historical colonial inequalities and power structures.

Therefore, the three-day event in Cape Town marked more than the launch of a new consultation network; it signalled a reorientation of global justice discourse. By positioning formerly incarcerated individuals as knowledge producers and policy advisors, Incarceration Nations Network has catalysed a shift from carceral logics toward models grounded in dignity, expertise and lived reality that are needed globally. As GF Consulting begins its work, the challenge will be to sustain this momentum to ensure that lived experience remains not only visible but authoritative in shaping the future of justice systems, rehabilitation and reintegration worldwide.

Tammy Ayres, Kellie Moss, Elodie Laurent, Lucy Evans and Sonjah Stanley Niaah

April 2026

Tammy Ayres – March 2026

Across all six locations, the intersection of drug criminalisation and imprisonment is inseparable from mental health outcomes, both inside prisons and in the communities from which incarcerated populations are drawn. While the six-case study countries differ in scale, demography and drugs, this research aims to see if all reproduce a post-slavery order in which racialised suffering is criminalised, medicated and/or imprisoned.

HMPS Mazaruni, British Guiana, 19th century

All locations relied heavily on plantation slavery and African enslaved labour introduced by the colonisers (British, Dutch and French) largely for sugar production. Abolition of slavery (1834-1838) did not end coercion however, as it was followed by apprenticeship systems and/or indentured labour (mostly Indian), which has produced enduring racialised class stratification, linking Africaness/Blackness to disposability, inequality and labour extraction. Colonial governance normalised violence as a form of order and produced legal systems that were designed not to protect people, but to protect property, suppress resistance, and discipline racialised labour. These systems were not dismantled after abolition; they were modified and retained, continuing to regulate mobility, sexuality, cultural practices, mental illness, substances and their use (intoxication). As part of the colonial criminal justice systems, prisons were used to punish and incarcerate, disproportionately impacting the labouring and formerly enslaved peoples. Drugs were also framed as a moral failure, a criminal threat, racialised and classed, while historically their prohibition and criminalisation disproportionately affected, and continues to effect, poor, racialised populations. As shown elsewhere the criminalisation of some substances but not others often replaced plantation discipline as a technology of control (Ayres, 2020, Ayres et al. 2021; Moss 2020; Moss et al.  2022; legacies that linger and haunt the present creating the colonial imaginary (see Ayres et al. 2024; Ayres, 2026).

The colonial imaginary describes the ideological framework that racialised, classed and moralised populations under colonial rule, and continues to shape contemporary society in these countries including drug prohibition, which produces selective criminalisation of substances and people, maintaining social hierarchies and masking structural harms inherited from slavery, indentured labour, colonial governance and global capitalism (Ayres et al. 2024). As the author has argued elsewhere, this is part of the Global Drug Apartheid

‘where drug policy and legislation – now and historically – has created a hierarchy of institutionalised segregation, which privileges certain substances and their users whilst criminalising and punishing others. This drug apartheid represents a system of inclusion and exclusion…Resultantly, whilst the drug apartheid proliferates drug related harms most acutely on those populations who are already economically and politically marginalised, its remit is said to permeate the entire social strata’ (Ayres and Taylor,  2025:76-77; Taylor et al. 2016).

Across all six case-study countries, drugs for the most part remain prohibited (possession and supply) with one exception, cannabis. Cannabis in Jamaica was first formally decriminalised in 2015 for medicinal, religious (e.g. Rastafarianism) and small-scale personal use. It is currently the only Caribbean (CARICOM) country to do so, although in 2019 Trinidad and Tobago and in 2021 Barbados amended their drug laws also to introduce fines/fixed penalties for possession of small quantities of cannabis, and have also regulated medical and sacramental cannabis. Guyana, has done similar, and no longer sends people to prison permits persons for possession of 30 grams or less of cannabis (see Ayres, 2020)[i]. These changes to cannabis reflect wider trends around the world as cannabis seems to have become seen as the natural first choice for decriminalisation and legalisation. The contemporary privileging of cannabis as the ‘obvious’ first drug for reform reproduces the colonial logic of the 1961 UN Single Convention, which classified substances not by harm but by racialised, cultural and economic hierarchies, legitimising selective inclusion while leaving the punitive architecture of drug prohibition intact. A there is no scientific basis for privileging cannabis over some other drugs, which have been deemed to be less harmful, illustrating that this decision is political and populist, not evidence-based.

View of the conference room on January 24, 1961 at the United Nations in New York. UN Photo: United Nations Conference for the Adoption of a Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs | United Nations

Despite the lack of evidence base underpinning drug prohibition, all other drugs are prohibited via legislation – Mauritius (Dangerous Drugs Act), Seychelles (Misuse of Drugs Act), Barbados (Drug Abuse (Prevention and Control) Act), Trinidad and Tobago (Dangerous Drugs Act), Guyana (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act), and Jamaica (Dangerous Drugs Act) – although the most commonly used drugs tend to differ across countries, which is reflected in their annual reports and/or drug policies (Mauritius (National Control Drug Master Plan 2019-2023), Seychelles (Drug Control Master Plan 2009-2012), Barbados (ASKED JAN), Trinidad and Tobago (The Operational Plan for Drug Control 2021-2025), Guyana (Drug strategy Master Plan 2016-2020), and Jamaica (National Drug Prevention and Control Master Plan 2015-2019). While cannabis is used in all, alongside other recreational drugs like cocaine and ecstasy/molly, opiates like heroin although present in the Caribbean, use is rarely reported, compared to Mauritius and the Seychelles, which has been described as having a ‘heroin crisis’ with the ‘highest per capita rates of heroin use in the world.’ This is largely because both sit along major heroin trafficking routes (and growing regional methamphetamine and cocaine routes) and illustrates how mental illness, addiction and punishment converge. Whilst all locations are transit routes for drugs, albeit for slightly different drugs, Barbados has a lower trafficking role than the others, which research shows impacts levels of guns and violence in these countries (Bird et al. 2021; CARICOM et al. 2025), and prison violence, where drugs have been linked to organised crime (e.g. in Jamaica[ii]).

Union Vale Prison, Seychelles, C. 1952

Although changes to cannabis laws have reduced arrests and imprisonment for cannabis-related offences, significant numbers of people continue to be incarcerated for drug possession and trafficking across all case-study countries, with data often incomplete or uneven. In Mauritius, for example, 21.5% of convicted drug offenders were imprisoned in 2023, including a disproportionate number of foreign nationals and women; notably, 20% of women in prison are incarcerated for drug-related offences, despite women comprising only 20% of the total prison population. Comparable patterns are evident elsewhere: in Guyana, 21% of the prison population is incarcerated for drug-related offences (14% of all incarcerations in 2022), the majority linked to cannabis, while in Barbados drug offences accounted for 11% of all imprisonments in 2022 and in 2020, the only drug offence women were imprisoned for was possession. Across all locations, the continued criminalisation of drugs has contributed to prison overcrowding – particularly acute in the Caribbean (e.g. Guyana 60%, Trinidad and Tobago (38%), Jamaica (36%) and Barbados (2%)), while simultaneously displacing unmet mental health needs into the penal system, where substance use disorders and psychological distress are managed through punishment rather than care. In these contexts, prisons operate as de facto psychiatric institutions, now as they did historically (e.g. see Anderson and Halliwell, 2024), absorbing populations for whom community-based mental health infrastructure is limited or inaccessible.

Therefore, the overall aim of this research is to see if drugs cultures and addiction in prisons are rooted in colonial-era health practices, law and population management and not solely in modern medical regimes and criminal justice system. It will examine whether drugs, mental illness and prisons function as postcolonial substitutes for slavery’s management of excess undesirable and vulnerable populations and can be understood as a continuation of plantation-era population management. In postcolonial countries these vulnerabilities are intensified by histories of enslavement, indenture, racialised poverty and ongoing social exclusion.

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[i] Mauritius and the Seychelles have introduced limited provisions for medicinal cannabis, recreational possession and supply are still criminal offences punishable by imprisonment with penalties in the Seychelles being the strictest in the region.

[ii] ‘A mass killing in August 2024 was committed by detainees Jamaica involved in organised crime’ in Jamaica.

This programme ‘Prisons, Drugs and Mental Health: an interdisciplinary global study’ has been funded by the Wellcome Trust (Discovery Award) and is directed by Principal Investigator Professor Clare Anderson. The project is a partnership between the University of Leicester, University of Guyana, University of the West Indies, and Le Chantier (Mauritius). A multi-disciplinary research team is researching the production, supply, use, and lived experience of drugs among prison communities, c.1800 to the present day to produce historicised knowledge, insights, and concepts that aim to reduce long-term health challenges and inequalities associated with drugs and their burden on criminal justice systems globally.

Its aim is to identify the multisystemic factors – medical, socio-economic, cultural, institutional – that can help trace connections and disconnections between historic practice and the present day.

The project’s perspective is historical, social and cultural. It is rooted in the hypothesis that drug cultures and addiction in prisons, including the use of prescription medication to control prisoners, are rooted in colonial era health practices, law, and population management and not solely in modern medical regimes and criminal justice systems.

During the course of the programme we will build a global team that will transform understandings of drugs, addiction and mental health, among prison communities, in colonial and post-colonial settings. Inspire and catalyse global research communities that can integrate diverse perspectives – and work towards breaking the cycles that leave people and communities behind. Create ‘useable pasts’ of drugs as social rather than individual determinants of mental health and explore their global impacts now using decolonizing and culturally affirming methodologies.