Chapter 2: The Bureaucratic Architecture

This chapter explores the question of how Myanmar prisons are administered, with specific focus on bureaucracy, rules, and the distribution of authority. We attend to the question of who runs the prison with focus on the supervisory and disciplinary roles designated to prisoners and the figure of the prison Superintendent. We examine the multiplicity of rules and the various ways in which they are learned, experienced, arbitrarily enforced, and inevitably broken. We demonstrate the value of thinking about everyday prison governance as a bureaucratic, authorising endeavour that involves practices of registration, ordering, sequencing, queueing, and organising, informed by values like facelessness, invisibility, and apparent neutrality. Attending to rules – to their inculcation and their effects – reveals the value of conceiving of them as ordering technologies that contribute to the organisation and regulation of everyday prison life.