Prison Oversight, Accountability, and Marginalization in Bangladesh and Canada: From Global South and Decolonial Perspectives

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 12: Jails and Prisons

Abstract

The article examines prison oversight and accountability mechanisms for their capacity to protect the rights of marginalized prisoners in Canada and Bangladesh. While transparency and oversight are widely promoted as a safeguard against abuse, critical scholarship shows that they also normalize carceral power and obscure structural harm (Arbour, 1996; Sapers & Zinger, 2009). In Canada, the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI) functions as an ombudsman independently investigation and reporting directly to Parliament yet its recommendations remain non-binding and dependent on Correctional Services Canada (CSC) for implementation. In Bangladesh, no equivalent statutory prison oversight body exists; instead, accountability is fragmented among the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), courts, and human rights NGOs, producing uneven protection for political detainees. Using a qualitative comparative design, we analyze OCI and NHRC annual reports, NGO documentation, legal texts, and other policy materials published over the past decade. We conducted relevant interviews with professionals, personnels and advocates. From a decolonial and Global South criminology, our analysis asks how ombuds institutions and human rights NGOs operate within uneven legal orders in settler colonial and postcolonial contexts (Arbour, 1996; Sapers & Zinger, 2009; Agozino, 2003; Cunneen & Tauri, 2016). Our findings reveal contrasting yet convergent limits. In Canada, oversight generates extensive knowledge and discourse about over-incarceration and systematic structural harms but rarely produces decarceration beyond managerial reform. In Bangladesh, the political authority of the government over oversight bodies, especially NHRC, and authoritarian governance, and the weak institutionalization of civil society, severely limiting their capacity to challenge prison violence. In both contexts, transparency and oversight are contested terrain regarding reform and decarceration. For this reason, we advocate prison abolition. Our study contributes a South–North framework for evaluating oversight beyond institutional design, emphasizing decolonial accountability, binding remedies, and prisoner-led knowledge as prerequisites for social justice.

Authors

• Mohammed Jahirul Islam

• Hollis Moore, Assistant Professor, Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University, Canada

• Md. Lab Hossain, Master of Science (MS), Department of Criminology and Police Science, Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University, Santosh, Tangail, Bangladesh.