Public (In)action, Lived Experience of Juvenile Incarceration and Critical Reformism in Cameroonian Prisons

ABSTRACT

My personal experience as a former incarcerated minor, and as a junior scholar questioning the penal system in Cameroon, has shown me that punishment is not the only policy action implemented by the public authorities in Cameroon to combat delinquency. I put forward the concept of public (in)action to show that, alongside the official staging of punishment, the collaboration between the public authorities in charge of repressing crime, offenders and their families, also allows for non-incarceration and non-punishment. My positionality as a former juvenile offender has enabled me to observe the combination of actions and inactions, which I call public in(action), in solving the public problem represented by juvenile delinquency or crime. In public (in)action, non-incarceration and incarceration, investigation and non-investigation of offences, arrest and non-arrest of offenders coexist and contradict each other. By interweaving non-incarceration and the materialisation of incarceration, public (in)action paves the way to an intermediary analysis based on a critical reformism capable of bringing together all the actors involved in the contradictory and tense political arena of public action. The questions are as follows: What can we learn from this public (in)action, taking the experience of incarceration and juvenile delinquency in Cameroon as the starting point for our reflection? How can personal experience of incarceration and its avoidance be taken into account in penal policies? What social and theoretical contradictions do public (in)action and critical reformism bring to light in the realm of prisons in Cameroon? Guided by an epistemic analysis of my life experience, and the multiple fieldworks I conducted in the Cameroonian prisons in 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2025, this proposal tries to answer these questions.