Many turn to the introduction of an edited volume looking for an incisive analytic overview and a brief synthesis of the issues at stake, and neglect the substantive chapters. This would be a mistake in the case of Human Rights in African Prisons for two reasons. First, because the Introduction adds little to the substantive chapters, except to frame them in overambitious terms; and second, because the greatest strength of the volume is the depth of the substantive chapters. Each chapter offers useful information and analytic insight of relevance particularly to those with special interests in the specific topic being addressed, such as women, children, pre-trial detention, rehabilitation, or alternative sentencing. Examples from a multiplicity of African countries are served up, giving the reader insights into the many challenges facing African prisons and especially the rights-based penal reformer. As a whole, however, the volume suffers from too few interconnections and too much repetition across chapters.

The Introduction points out that there are few comparative studies of African prisons, which is true, but the full potential of comparative analysis is not utilised, partly because the empirical foundation for such analysis remains lacking. The volume also fails in its bid to be comprehensive and its attempt to ‘draw together the available research’. It does succeed in highlighting the ‘vast gap between the international legal obligations assumed by African states and the reality of the treatment of prisoners in those states’ (p. 5), but this is not surprising news – there exist a plethora of human rights reports and NGO publications documenting precisely that fact. There clearly remains a pressing need for analytic studies of prison practices in Africa which would contribute to improving the empirical knowledge base on which to ground recommendations for change. We still need to know more than how poor conditions are for particular groups, or how much states fail to meet their obligations; we need to spend less time highlighting the obvious, and more time trying to theorise why the situation is as it is and what might alleviate it. The latter objective is shared by the volume's contributors and they make some headway. But the hope of ‘sweeping reforms’ across the continent as a response to relevant human rights instruments and declarations may be so optimistic that it shrouds the possibility of thinking more imaginatively at a local level about possibilities for reform. We should remember that most changes in penal systems happen incrementally.

On a more positive note, Dissel, in her chapter on rehabilitation, rightly observes the need to ‘encourage the many existing small initiatives … which serve to undo some of the damage done to prisoners’. And at a more conceptual level Muntingh's sharp analysis of alternative sentencing possibilities recognises that such options should not be explored only as a way to reduce overcrowding, but within the context of broader discussions on the nature of punishment and sentencing in the respective African contexts – ‘it is imprisonment itself that needs to be critically examined’ (p. 198). Vetten too sensibly highlights the need for more ‘nuanced understandings of punishment and control on the continent’ (p. 148), and for ‘more empirical research in this area, as well as theorizing that adequately takes the heterogeneity of African institutions, politics, culture, histories and practices into account’ (p. 152). This volume represents a start but there is a long way to go.