Number-one enemy: police, violence and the location of adversaries in a Papua New Guinean prison.

Reed, Adam

INTRODUCTION

When a police car enters the main compound of Bomana gaol, Papua New Guinea's largest correctional facility, inmates in the vicinity stop what they are doing and stare. Men in grass cutting work gangs unbend and hold their machetes to watch as the blue vehicle passes through them and up the driveway. Lines of convicts, loitering outside the reception area as they wait to see the prison chaplain or petition the welfare warders, hush and adjust their gaze. Those assigned to sweep offices or store the property of new arrivals interrupt their tasks to seek out a better vantage point. All eyes follow as the police car turns and parks, its doors open and the Constabulary members step out. The first thing inmates notice is whether the policemen are uniformed or plainclothes detectives; if the latter, they search the figures further, to see whether they might recognize their investigating officer. This look is long and hard, intentionally menacing but also born of fear. For, as many of the prisoners I met stated, everyone knows that the police are their 'number-one enemy' (nambawan birua). The assertion is not casually made. Inmates genuinely loathe and detest policemen. They are, to quote prison autograph or souvenir books--the inmate equivalent of the school-leaver's yearbook (see Reed 2006: 159, 162)--the 'most hated'; subjects, it is often promised, upon whom 'revenge' will one day be taken.

As prisoners are quick to outline, they have good reasons for their enmity. Regardless of their guilt, inmates hold the police responsible for the state they are in and for the nature of their arrest, prosecution and conviction. But it is as victims of police brutality and extra-legal punishment that they can justify the strength of their animosity. Interrogation beatings are said to be commonplace; a fact evident from a visit to the prison clinic where duty warders devote much of their time to bandaging the head wounds and other injuries of newly transferred men from the police cells. More seriously, inmates speak of post-capture maiming and deliberate shootings; rumours abound in Bomana and outside the gaol of summary executions by arresting officers (Lattas, Mitchell, Rio, this collection). Fear of the injury that police might inflict dominates not just the waking thoughts of prisoners but also their nighttime sleep. Individuals report and discuss among cellmates dreams of chase and violent seizure; typically the dreamer is running away from the Constabulary, trying to evade arrest, but is eventually caught and beaten, kicked or shot. Another common dream image involves being pursued and bitten by police dogs. The sight of screaming bodies and blood soaked faces in dreaming is usually taken to indicate the fate of comrades in the city--Bomana is just outside the national capital Port Moresby--or their own fate after they have gained release. Either way, the focus remains on the expectation that police will assault them.

Taken as an example of state power at its most raw and brutish, the violent actions of police should be read in historical context. First German and British and then Australian colonial regimes in Papua New Guinea rested to a large extent on the ability of European patrol officers to impose their authority through extra-legal punitive measures: organized raids of villages, house burnings, shootings and punishment beatings (Lattas and Rio, this collection; cf. Dinnen and McLeod 2009; Gordon and Meggitt 1985; Knauft 1999; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991). To a large extent, the officer's indigenous armed constabulary carried out these measures (see Gammage 1996; Kituai 1998). Indeed, they were trained to operate throughout the country as a kind of para-military force (Kituai 1998: 35). From the perspective of villagers, the power of policemen derived from the fact they 'were stronger and apparently ruthless and unpredictable' actors (1998: 34). It seems that this assumption remains important in postcolonial policing. Both in villages and towns the Constabulary are feared as much as respected. Police work in Port Moresby, for instance, is usually reactive rather than community-based; (1) typified by the often harsh nature of police raids on urban settlements, which sees property removed, homes destroyed and residents bullied or hit (Goddard 2005: 199-200; see Koczberski, Curry and Connell 2001; Oram 1976). Once again, the point is that the police are seen as the agents of violence as much as protectors or guardians against it (Rio, Mitchell, this collection). (2)

The issue is important when one comes to assess the nature of state power in Papua New Guinea and the nature of what we might call resistance. For it redirects our attention from an emphasis on the disciplining or normative strategies and bureaucratic technologies of colonial and postcolonial governance, the kinds of analysis of micro-power inspired by the work of Foucault (1977, 1991; see Mitchell 1998; Reed 1997; Rose and Miller 2008; Scott 1998; Stoler 1995), back towards a focus on the state as embodied force(s). At the same time it invites us to rethink what the state is in a place like Papua New Guinea and how it relates or disconnects from the population it is held to govern. As several anthropologists have highlighted, Papua New Guineans are generally struck by the absence of the state in their lives, its failure to operate as a unitary entity that consistently delivers services and exercises administrative authority, whether directly or through distributive regimes (cf. Clark 1997; Douglas 2000; Foster 2002). Subjects may desire the state (see Aretxaga 2003) but feel they remain invisible to it, complain that they can't make politicians and administrators acknowledge them as citizens who deserve a return for their votes (Gewertz and Errington 1999). In this regard, the situation of prisoners at Bomana is rather exceptional; for the gaol is a space precisely defined by the presence or visibility of the state. Inmates know that they are locked up in a government facility and that they must live according to its rules. While it may be hard to figure Bomana as a panoptical system (see Reed 2003), the prison does exist as a site where particular kinds of relation with the state, often enacted through violence, seem possible and indeed tangible.

The fact that the police are identified as violent actors is in part troubling to anthropologists and Euro-American audiences because it contravenes one of the central tenets of our social description: the idea that the state, through law and its enforcement agents, acts as a form of 'social control' (M. Strathem 1985: 111). That is, the notion that between violence and law a shift in scale operates; like criminal behaviour, vicious or brutish acts are assumed to be the material upon which government, customary and legal forms work (by implication, the latter are taken to be after the fact of violence) (M. Strathern 1985:114-115; see Fitzpatrick 1992: 9). In the same way, the state is often assumed to come after the citizens or subjects it regulates, to belong to a 'second-order framing' (M. Strathern 1985: 128). This is also much like the distinction anthropologists draw between social analysis and concrete behaviour or action (1985:112). That we need to be wary of transferring models of social control into Melanesian understandings of violence is already well highlighted in work on traditional warfare and dispute settlement in Papua New Guinea (Cf. Harrison 1993; Knaufl 1999; Merlan and Rumsey 1991; Strathern A. 1984, 1993; Strathern M. 1985), but perhaps the lessons need to be relearned in the conventions of description applied to crime and crime fighting.

In this essay, I aim to explore how prisoners at Bomana, in the period I was there between 1994-1995, figured the violence of police. This includes an examination of what they understand to be state power and what they take to be their response to it, including the possibility of critique. Do inmates at Bomana recognize a scale shift between state and citizen, between law and violence? If so, when? How do they relate the actions of the Constabulary to their own violent behaviour and to the forceful or violent behaviour of others? These questions will be approached through the notion of enmity. In particular, by a discussion of what inmates mean when they label the police their 'number-one enemy'. I will argue that the best way of understanding this statement is to contrast the police with the other kinds of enemies that prisoners identify. Indeed, the essay investigates the idea that for them the very process of locating adversaries lies at the heart of what a relation to the state can be.

ENEMY GANGS

Despite the violence of police actions and what seems the obvious asymmetry in power between the agents and targets of law enforcement, it is important to acknowledge that in Papua New Guinea the act of designating or locating an enemy immediately suggests a state of equivalence (Harrison 1993: 51). Traditionally, one hates a body of men like one's own; another clan, for instance (M. Strathern 1988: 48-49). At Bomana this model of enmity draws its principal inspiration from the correspondence and tension between an alternative and very modern body of men: criminal or 'raskal' gangs. Often cutting across ties of regional identity, including those between language mates or wantok, this relation animates the behaviour between inmates and the terms of their own rivalry. It also crucially informs the notion of the police as adversaries. In fact, it is as 'gang mates' (wangang) that prisoners most frequently speak of their animosity towards the Constabulary and of their desire for revenge.

In the time I was there, inmates articulated the basis of gang enmity inside and outside the gaol through a grand contrast between two named units: GMK and BK Force. Both acronyms described alliances between gangs, whose own names were said to be contained in the letters: GMK, I was told for instance, stood for GGB, Mafia and Kouvera who were enemies to Bomai and Koboni, the names revealed to be within BK Force (the acronyms could also reveal other gang names). Under each of these names inmates recognized a multitude of other names belonging to branches of the gang in the city or elsewhere in Papua New Guinea. So one Bomai convict I knew could identify gang names for many of the neighbourhoods in Port Moresby: he claimed to be Ace Kongo Bomai of Morata Stage 2, but other boys he knew were JJQ (Junior Japs Quality) Bomai of Hanuabada, DTR (Down Town Rats) Bomai, BMB (Boroko Market Boys) Bomai, BTR (Brutes Town Roots) Bomai of East Boroko, Nazi Spiders Bomai of 5 Mile and HBC (Highway Boys Company) Bomai of 6 Mile. While the names of branches changed frequently, the gang name tended to remain continuous; the inmates identifying with the listed names above would insist that despite their dispersal across the city 'we are Bomai' (mipela Bomai). Part of that identification involved agreeing which prisoners were their adversaries, or as their autographs often put it, which were their 'enemies in common'.

Indeed, it is possible to read the organization and form of prison society at Bomana as an effect of gang enmity; the vast majority of inmates recognize an identification with a gang name. Within convict and remand cells--long barrack room style buildings--men hang blankets from suspended wires to create screened spaces or 'corners' (kona) where gang mates can dwell and sleep together (see Reed 2003). Inside they share cigarettes and food, swap stories of criminal exploits and discuss court proceedings. Generally, enemy gangs try to locate themselves in different cells, but since the allocation of prisoners is at the discretion of warders they often have to accommodate themselves to living together. In this situation, the screened spaces allow cellmates to exist side by side but out of sight of one another; it is forbidden to enter the corner of those from an enemy gang. Men of the same gang name may also share a patch of ground outside the cell, where they plant spinach and flowers, sit down to eat meals and talk. They will invariably belong to the same sports team, stand together on parade and at special events like Independence Day celebrations and, when allowed, join the same work party. Finally, when a prisoner is due for release it is his gang mates who will organize a party in his honour.

However, as prisoners emphasize, the presence and support of gang mates depends on constant acts of differentiation. Everyone knows that other forms of relations may be evoked that obviate the gang name. Those who identify as wantok, for instance, whether Goilala, Simbu, Kerema or Sepik, may also occupy cell corners. The threat is not just that gang mates will be revealed as men from different provinces with separate obligations, but that men who are gang enemies will elicit the fact that as language mates or work mates or school mates they are one. Gangs then are not social organizations in the conventional sense, with a formal structure and enlisted membership (Cf. Clifford, Morauta and Stuart 1984; Dinnen 1998; Harris 1988; Hart-Nibbrig 1992; Goddard 1992, 1995; Schiltz 1985); they require active work and effort to remain visible. Like the clans engaged in traditional warfare described by Harrison (1993: 9), the foregrounding of gang mates and the notion of enmity is always an accomplishment. For inmates, the work and effort involved is captured in the idea of 'the game', which presents them in a constant struggle to raise the profile of their own gang and lower that of their opponents. So when prisoners succeed in smuggling and distributing large amounts of tobacco into the gaol, gang mates state that the action 'upim nem blong mipela' (raises our name). When they rape an inmate who is recognized to be from an enemy gang, the action is said to 'bagarapim nem blong or (ruin their name). Similarly, the outcome of a football or touch rugby match, fights between inmates or petitions to the gaol commander are all taken to result in the raising and lowering of gang names. (3)

The same competitive ethos animates criminal activities outside Bomana. According to inmates, a large part of the motivation to commit crimes lies in the desire to outdo the exploits of gang enemies. If GGB boys succeed in stealing 1000 kina, then Koboni boys will aim to steal more; when the theft occurs they may drive round the neighbourhood of their adversary, banging the car door and shouting their name. Not just the amount but also the nature of the crime is judged to impress. Gang mates struggle or 'race' (resis) to commit greater crimes than their enemies: it is assumed that the prestige elicited by a housebreaking, for instance, may be diminished by a successful bank robbery, and that the visibility achieved by a bank robbery may be eclipsed by a high profile hostage-taking. Getting the crime reported in the newspaper is particularly valued. Indeed, inmates at Bomana exchange reports and stories about criminal activities and the gang names associated with them. This is a kind of crime accountancy that is itself taken to be a form of competition; prisoners claim that in gaol their enemies steal their crimes, claiming the exploits for themselves. Whether enacted or retold, the important point is that these actions perform the gang division between men, make it seem as if gang mate is the only relation that counts.

But criminal activities may be presented as part of a different struggle. As well as lowering the name of their gang enemies and raising the name of their own gang, inmates claim that the enactment of crime places them in competition with the police. Indeed, the whole process of law-breaking and law enforcement is depicted as a form of antagonistic exchange between equivalent bodies of men. A large and high profile robbery, for instance, is said to diminish the reputation of the Constabulary; as is the identification and punishment of 'informers' in gaol (an informer is anyone who has given information to the police, including those who have testified against gang boys in court). To gang mates it is not just the size of the crime that matters, but also its boldness or daring; a bank robbery in daylight insults the police more than a bank robbery at night. Likewise the actions of policemen in arresting offenders and gathering evidence against the accused is taken to lower the gang names of men and raise the name of the Constabulary. Gang mates view police aggression, including interrogation beatings and summary executions, as part of this race or opposition. It is the levels of violence committed against them that makes the police their 'number-one enemy'. In fact they tend to valorize the violent confrontation; the car chase or police shoot-out, for instance, is especially esteemed. Whether committing crime or crime fighting, gang mates seem to argue that subjects engage in a transaction of injury. (4)

If the enmity and confrontation with police mirrors the form of enmity and confrontation between gangs, then it also gives rise to a criminal exemplar: the 'fit man' or 'hardcore'. This is someone who gains the respect of gang mates through the courage, audacity and sheer willfulness of his criminal activities and engagements with the Constabulary. He may be famous for initiating a new crime (hijacking a helicopter or airplane, for instance) or leading a grand theft, for the length of his criminal record or the defiant nature of his capture and arrest. He is also someone who commits crime deliberately, for the sake of it; the contrast here is not just with the villager or plesman in Bomana, who is said to make trouble accidentally (mi no wokim trable, trabel painim mi), but with those gang mates who commit minor and opportunistic offences such as housebreaking and pick pocketing. Often recorded in autographs as the 'most admired', these men are designated as 'big boys' (bikboi) by their gang mates, held responsible for promoting the gang name outside the gaol and co-ordinating activities within it (see Dinnen 1993). The last time that a large-scale gang conflict erupted in Bomana for instance, I was told that it was the bikboi who led the fighting but also who organized the compensation payments of soap, toothpaste, tobacco and marijuana that subsequently cooled it. As well as setting the tone for criminal activity, they act as spokesmen for the gang in dealings with other big boys and as 'targets' for police aggression. Indeed, the gang reputation most dramatically falls or rises with their exploits. The killing of a hardcore gang mate or the failure of his criminal plans can seriously damage the future of that name.

Although the degree to which members of the Constabulary regard themselves as an equivalent body of men to gang boys is unclear (I did not work with policemen), the fact that inmates assign them the perspective and motivation of enmity is important. First and foremost, it allows gang mates to consider the actions of police as of the same order as their own; in this description, there is no scale shift between law and its transgression. Indeed, I argue that the notion of number-one enemy throws the state's agents of enforcement into radical relief. While big boys and their gang mates regularly evoke a hierarchical division between the 'top people' or 'high society'--usually identified as politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats, supported by the police--and the 'grassroots' in Papua New Guinea, they also imagine that the relation can be reconstituted as a form of rivalry or struggle between adversaries. In fact hardcore gang mates sometimes talk of being 'rebels' or 'terrorists', of their criminal activities as subversive actions against the police but also against the government (see Dinnen 2000). In Bomana big boys discuss and offer critiques of the state of the nation and debate the difference between 'justified' and 'unjustified' crimes. Stealing, for instance, is regarded as a legitimate activity in the current economic and social climate, but big boys differ over the status of murder, rape and drug-taking (Lattas, Mitchell, Rio, this collection). Their discussions include plans to adopt an explicit political strategy, dreams of starting a political party and turning the support of gang mates into votes and electoral success. The ambition may be unrealistic, not least because the grassroots, or what some inmates call the 'normal man', do not necessarily regard criminal activities in the same way as the hardcore, but it does present a vision of transformation. This is because an enemy of the state embodies potentials that a 'citizen' or 'subject' cannot; like the notion of number-one enemy, it evokes the promise of competitive symmetry.

LITTLE ENEMIES

If the nature of gang enmity illuminates the claim to radical equivalence that big boys and their gang mates wish to make when talking of police aggression and their own criminal activities, the parallel also draws out the difference. For the Constabulary is both like and unlike other kinds of enemies they identify. As Harrison (1993:47) highlights, talking about the people of Avatip and their neighbours along the banks of the Sepik River, individuals often state that they 'marry those we fight'. Indeed, the idea that one's enemies are one's affines is common to many Melanesian societies. Among the Avatip this leads to assumptions that enemies are always subjects one knows rather than complete strangers (1993:51); so that when foreigners do appear, such as the first white colonizers, they are taken to be proxy agents for familiar adversaries rather than opponents in their own right (1993: 62). While it is possible to recognize the same dimensions of familiarity between men stealing under different gang names--gang enmity is also a close sort of social relationship with adversaries living next to each other in gaol and often in the same neighbourhoods or streets outside Bomana--the example does not really extend to relations with the police. Hardcore consistently emphasize the distance between them and the Constabulary. In this case, one of the characteristics of being a number-one enemy is strangeness and lack of familiarity; a claim that since crosscutting relations between policemen and gang boys, like relations between men from different gangs, can always be revealed requires a certain discipline on both sides to maintain.

Another way to draw out the specificity of this enmity is to contrast gang mate attitudes towards the police with their attitudes towards prison warders and officers. For, as I was consistently told, unlike the Constabulary, the latter are only 'little enemies' (liklik birua). The claim distinguishes not just between the behaviour of two types of law enforcement agents, registering the different degrees of their aggression--convicts claim that at Bomana, unlike in the police cell, they are not afraid--but also between two types of relations to the state. It also highlights what is for them distinctive about life in gaol.

The recognition of a lesser form of enmity, however, does not mean that gang boys deny the punitive, and sometimes violent, nature of the prison regime. As everyone knows from firsthand experience, new inmates at Bomana are routinely kicked and whipped with hosepipe at their first inspection. Indeed, punishment beatings are a regular feature of prison discipline: men on work gangs caught smuggling money or tobacco expect to be hit, as do those who speak back to warders at morning roll call or challenge instructions to 'go bek insait' (a popular phrase of warders that means 'return to your cells!'). To me, at least, this kind of violence was casual and surprisingly public, even documented. In the Daily Occurrence Register, an official log of inmate offences and warder actions housed in the welfare office, for instance, typical entries included statements such as: 'disobeying orders- I belt them both in cell', 'rape of another detainee- punished by caning', 'argue over greens and fought- whipped and sent back to compound', 'I punched an unknown remandee and he fell to the oval'. Undocumented, more hidden punitive actions included taking especially disrespectful or troublesome inmates out of the cell compounds to a room below the gaol commander's office where they would be severely beaten-up. More dramatically, when large-scale fights break out, prison officers sometimes order a 'lock-down', detaining inmates within their cell blocks and then charging in with an assortment of weapons and arbitrarily assaulting those inside.

These violent illegal measures are accompanied by a host of officially sanctioned punitive options. Warders can and do suspend the weekend visits of misbehaving inmates; they can also remove them from working parties or ban them from participating in team sports. Periodically, they may conduct cell raids, punishing members of a recalcitrant cellblock by removing their property and destroying all but the most formally legal items. Those guilty of more serious prison offences, such as rape or violent injury, can be placed in the detention cells: small, dark and barred spaces between the main cellblocks without unlocked entry to cell compounds, where inmates may remain for periods of up to three months. Such offenders may also be handed over to the police, taken to court and prosecuted, usually receiving an extension of their prison term. Finally, men guilty of killing another inmate or assaulting warders may be sent to the Maximum Security Institution, a unit ten minutes walk from the main prison facility which houses inmates in individual cells and bars them from any access to the outside world.

For gang boys, the asymmetrical nature of this relation is evinced in the aggression and punitive power of warders, but also in the insistence of the latter that inmates address them as 'boss'; a refusal to do so, can lead to a violent response from warders. The term denotes the hierarchical nature of prison organization, but in addition it marks an aspect of what makes the staff at Bomana a lesser enemy than the police. For alongside the beatings and punishment, gang boys acknowledge that warders sometimes show them care and concern. Most concretely, they house and feed inmates; individuals may complain at the monotony of the gaol diet--tinned fish or tinned meat and rice--yet they praise its regularity of supply and the fact, in contrast to the city, that it is free. Prisoners highlight that, unlike the police, warders sometimes listen to their problems and offer advice. Indeed, every morning staff at the welfare office hear the petitions of the 'worry line' (wari lain). These range from complaints about the behaviour of other inmates to anxieties about the situation of kin outside the gaol, the developments of their court case, issues of personal health or cases pertaining to arrangements for travel once they are released. To me, what stood out in these conversations was the willingness of the welfare officers to let the prisoners talk, uninterrupted and at length, and then suggest practical solutions; a process also logged in the Daily Occurrence Register. For gang mates, these actions highlighted that at Bomana it was possible to say that the state, absent and desired outside the gaol, looked after them.

In fact prisoners intermittently evoke an idiom of nurture. The relation between warders and convicts is sometimes compared to that between parent and child; an analogy that can be contained in the use and enforcement of the designation 'boss'. In this reading, warder violence is like the aggression of fathers, harsh but loving. If not equivalence, there is at least a sense of 'complementarity'; that is, in the way that Wagner (1972: 45) means it, as 'a relationship between complementary parts.., in which each part performs services in reciprocation for the services of the other'. So the state and its agents feed and watch over inmates who in turn offer their respect and obedience. For some warders, this explains the lack of concern for personal security shown by staff in their dealings with prisoners. Warders can and do, for instance, enter cellblocks alone and unarmed, without fear of assault. They also regularly escort working parties of machete-carrying convicts on grass-cutting tasks outside the perimeter fence. Instead of a competition or exchange of injury, this image presents an unmediated and interdependent relation between the state and those detained at its pleasure.

However, the parent-child relation fails to grasp the full dimension of this complementary opposition. Interdependence is not just a matter of soliciting the respect and obedience of convicts; it also involves recognition on the part of staff that they need the cooperation of gang boys and other inmates to run the prison. A vital part of the regime at Bomana, for instance, is the cell committee system. This relies on a small number of prisoners elected by their cellmates to enforce cell rules and maintain order and to liaise on behalf of their cellmates with guards. So it is the committeemen who ensure that cellmates arrive at morning roll call on time, who report any absences due to ill health and who inform the welfare office when someone in the cellblock seems weighed down with worries. Likewise it is the cell committee who makes sure that the cell is kept tidy and regularly washed down and that the drop toilets at the back of the block are kept clean and working. Committeemen try to ensure that cellmates stop making noise after the 9pm bell and that fights are defused and tensions cooled. To work effectively, the cell committee must have the support of gang big boys. Indeed, he is often appointed with their approval; sometimes big boys take on the role themselves but more often they delegate it to a gang mate. The same cooperation between staff and inmates ensures the success of organized prison events; a committee largely composed of big boys, for example, runs Independence Day, Christmas and New Year celebrations at Bomana.

But the reduced level of enmity is not just an outcome of complementarity. Unlike the police, warders are constantly vulnerable to the demands of identities that cut across the divide between gaoler and inmate. This is another reason that gang boys only regard them as little enemies. Chief among these demands is the obligation that warders feel towards their language mates or wantok. Prison guards are less likely to hit a wantok prisoner or report them when found smuggling money, smoking or drinking homebrew. They are more likely to submit to the requests of language mates for help in contacting lawyers or family, accessing tobacco or marijuana and joining work gangs. However, the vulnerability of warders to these obligations is also a perceived strength. While some prison staff insist that their safety among inmates is due to the respect owed them as 'boss', that includes the threat of violent punishment, the majority of warders admit that it is really down to the knowledge that wantok prisoners will always protect them. In other words, the hierarchy between staff and detainees operates in the knowledge that enemies may at any moment be revealed as brothers: i.e. those who share language or custom and hence are 'one' (wan). This is the same observation that informs a notion of the fractured or failed state in Papua New Guinea, an entity vitally divided by language group interests (see Koczberski, Curry and Connell 2001), and the idea of wantokism as the generator of government corruption. (5)

At Bomana the point is most exaggerated when one comes to consider the response to escape. Despite the high perimeter fence, the gaol is remarkably leaky; in my time there, a fourteen-month period, I estimate that over eighty prisoners ran away. Inmates escape in order to visit sick or dying kin, check on spouses they fear might be unfaithful, sort out court cases or attend special events (the Port Moresby Show, for instance). Sometimes they abscond out of a sense of anger: the desire to seek revenge on the persons they hold responsible for their conviction or to punish prison staff who they believe have refused or insulted them. One man, for instance, told me he once escaped because a guard would not allow him to access a new pair of trousers; another group of fugitives claimed they ran away because a senior prison officer verbally abused them at roll call. Among gang boys one of the main motivations to flee derives from the desire to raise the gang name and lower the reputation of their opponents. But whatever the cause, their actions generate considerable anxiety among the staff. Those on duty worry that they will be blamed for the escape, especially if the fugitive is a wantok; others, including the gaol commander, concern themselves about the repercussions of capture. In particular, they fear what will happen if the fugitives are injured or killed during the police chase; it seems that a significant number of escapees are shot by the Constabulary. Will this lead the kin and language mates of the wounded or deceased man to hold the staff at Bomana responsible? This anxiety sometimes leads the gaol commander and his senior officers to try and organize a 'surrender' of the fugitives without the involvement of the police (see Dinnen 1995). Through the mediation of gang mates and wantok outside, and promises that there will be no violent reprisals from warders or extensions of sentences upon return, the runaway may be coaxed back to gaol.

THE REAL ENEMY

During Pentecostal services at Bomana, the Sunday preacher invariably addresses the inmate congregation with a call and response sequence. 'Who is our real enemy?' he demands from them time and again. 'Satan!' they shout back assuredly and with increasing levels of volume. The anecdote highlights the fact that Bomana is not just a site of state punishment, of engagement with prison discipline and the authority of officers and guards, but also a location of extraordinary Christian conversion. Prisoners say that in gaol they turn to God (tainim bel), a move that completely alters the notion and target of enmity. For these inmates, struggles with police and warders are overshadowed by combat with greater forces (see Trnka, this collection). This requires a reinterpretation of criminal activity and crime fighting, of the legal process and incarceration. It elicits a different relation to the State and an alternative form of critique.

Among the most popular churches at Bomana are those that style themselves as new. Indeed, although all the main Christian denominations in Papua New Guinea--Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and United--are represented in the prison population, hosting and conducting weekly services, the tendency is to convert away from established structures of worship. This is especially the case among gang boys. They usually apply to either the Pentecostal service--an umbrella church that includes bodies such as the Assembly of God, Four Square Church and Christian Revival Centre--or the congregation of the Seven Day Adventists. Both define themselves in opposition to the form of worship and teaching of the established churches, (6) critical for instance of the role of clergy and the orthodox reading of the Bible, and both present a radical message about redirected enmity. Criminal activity, they claim, is ultimately not a result of the ambitions of gang boys or the competition to raise the gang name, but rather of the guiding agency and direction of Satan. Sometimes this is said to be a conscious alliance; those giving testimony in Pentecostal and Adventist services point to reports in national newspapers that describe 'pacts with the devil', stories of animal sacrifice and ceremonial consumption of human flesh carried out in order to guarantee Satanic support for criminal plans (see Kulick 1993: 10). But more commonly it is presented as an arrangement without intentionality. As one inmate preacher declared in English to his flock, 'gangs are pushed by the devil'. He explained that 'it is only after you have been captured and put in a police van that Satan leaves you and you are forced to recognize the Lord God.' Despite their self-presentation then, the hardcore are not really the authors of their actions; they are merely proxy agents for the devil's work.

This claim seems to appeal to gang big boys. Indeed, the Adventist church in particular has had great success in drawing these men into their congregation. Convicts previously recognized as hardcore hold all of the senior posts in the Adventist group. Such big boys usually succeed in persuading many of their gang mates to also convert and join the church; the extent to which big boys leave the gang or lose their authority among gang mates after conversion is blurred, though they certainly do make a declaration and commitment to ending criminal behaviour. In part, this explains the fact that at Bomana the SDA have the largest and most active membership of any Christian denomination, with Saturday services regularly attended by as many as seventy inmates, one tenth of the prison population. As well as organizing and leading Adventist services and trying to convince other inmates to convert, these ex-hardcore church elders present themselves as baptized 'new men'. As such, they imagine that they have a responsibility to protect fellow Adventists from 'backsliding' or falling again under the influence of Satan. Although Bomana is regarded as a place of relative safety--elders welcome what they observe as the similarities between penal and scriptural restrictions; the fact, for instance, that the prison service prohibits the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and betel nut and that the prison diet does not include foods such as pork designated as 'dirty' in the Bible--it is not immune from His tricks. Senior Adventists expect, for example, that the devil may be the cause of dreams (satan giammanim ol tinging blong man long driman); especially if these lead members to sexual temptations, wrong thinking or the desire to fight or escape. As well as offering interpretations of the reasons for individual dreaming, they attempt to monitor the mood of church mates (wanlotu) and anticipate any event that may lead them astray. One elder, for instance, tried to get the scheduled appearance of a pop band booked for the New Year celebrations stopped for fear that the music and lyrics might direct members back to thoughts of promiscuity and crime. This active watching is also something elders bestow on themselves; several of them told me that they kept a report book of 'daily self-assessment', logging with a tick any behaviour or emotions that they felt were sinful and therefore symptomatic of the agency of their true enemy. (7)

For Adventist and Pentecostal inmates, such activity points to a wider critique. Since only God is without sin, fully resistant to the pull of Satan, only He can pass final judgment. This means that the verdicts of human actors, including the legal agents of state, can only be provisional; they too are vulnerable to devilish tricks and bad thinking. It also suggests that courts need to take account of a sense of diminished criminal responsibility. (8) If offenders do not straightforwardly author their crimes, since they are under the influence of Satan, then they cannot be straightforwardly punished. The clause is important because it denies the authority of the government to execute a judgment in an absolute way; when I was at Bomana the death penalty had only recently been reintroduced and much controversy sparked by the first sentence handed down. (9) However, it is also important because it levels the relation between 'top people' and the 'grassroots', who are all equally sinful in the eyes of God. As these Christian inmates regularly highlight, there are no divisions between warders, police and gang boys in heaven, nor between wantok.

Yet the Christian message promoted by Pentecostal and Adventist inmates also relies on a call to respect the law (lo) and uphold earthly hierarchies (see Trnka, this collection). The new man, in contrast to the hardcore or fit man, is someone who defines himself as compliant in the face of authority. Indeed, the Adventist congregation often highlights what they view as the remarkable changes in the disposition and physical character of gang big boys once they become churchmen. Elders reflect on the fact that before they converted their manner was 'fierce', their bodies tight and muscled, their hair sharp and their eyes red, the appropriate condition for making crime and leading gang mates. After conversion the tone and shape of their bodies began to diminish, they became noticeably thinner and less imposing in their physical presence, and most significantly 'humble' in outward demeanour, characteristics that church mates identify as properly Christian. At the core of this transformation is an instruction that Adventist subjects must obey or listen (harim tok), a form of active conformity that radically outstrips the kind of respect elicited from inmates when warders and the State appear as nurturing agents. Here compliance is not the effect of a specific interdependence--a response, for instance, to acknowledged acts of feeding and housing by prison staff--but rather an end in itself.

It is a position to adopt across a range of relations identified as equivalently asymmetric. On school visiting outreach programs, for instance, Adventist inmates continually urge the pupils present to listen to their parents, listen to their teachers, listen to their employers, listen to the law and listen to the police. Similarly, at Bomana, while gang boys interpret the advice of warders as coercive (staff in the Welfare Office regularly conclude talks with inmates by stating 'I want you to listen, this is an important thing, listen, listen' [mi laik you harim tok, em i bikpela sainting, harim tok, harm, tok]), these Christian inmates tend to read it as continuous with their own message of universal compliance. The same perception leads them to appreciate the rituals of inspection and roll call at Bomana, to value the requirements to wash regularly, brush teeth, shave and keep hair short and tidy and fingernails clean as evidence of convergent values. On the way back to the gaol, members of the outreach program complained that the children they spoke to on the school visit had no 'discipline'. But for Adventists the act of obedience is significant and subversive because it ultimately subsumes the persons shown respect. In obeying warders, parents, teachers, police or judges they believe they are obeying God in mediated terms, acting with Him in mind. It is the form of that compliance rather than its content that makes it important; obedience is actually a way of listening to God--not warders, parents, teachers, police or judges--and knowing that you are not listening to Satan (see Trnka, this collection).

Although the moral obligation and radical compliance of Adventist prisoners does not carry the expectations of material reward or cargo familiar in Melanesian cult movements (Cf. Lattas 1998, 2006; Lawrence 1964; Worsley 1957), it does look towards a future point of redirection. Church elders tell their members that they must prepare themselves now for the Day of Judgment (las de) and that the only way to do this is to 'harim tok'. Behaviour influenced by Satan (pasim blong Satan), they explain, is behaviour defined by disobedience and violence (passim blong sakim tok na pait). But as well as indexing Satanic influence, lack of discipline and crime are signs that the end is coming, that it is imminent. On that day God will return in unmediated form, sinners will be punished and the Devil defeated. Those left, the obedient few, will be subjects without enemies.

CONCLUSION

The state then is never a straightforward regulator of individuals. In the imagination of prisoners, it does not stand apart, describe and manage their behaviour. For them, this is not because discipline or regulation constitutes the subjects it claims to govern nor is it because technologies and strategies of control are dispersed (see Foucault 1977, 1991), but as the deployment of enmity illustrates, because acts of governance appear to maintain scale with the acts of those who are governed (see M. Strathern 1985: 128). The violence of the Constabulary and legal process, for instance, can be seen as part of the competitive exchange between police and gangs. Likewise, detention and the work of custodial surveillance can be presented as forms of complementarity or interdependence between inmates and warders, their little enemies. Or, seen from one Christian perspective, as a site for the wider struggle between God and the devil. Adventist prisoners anticipate a future in which enmity dissolves that must be prefigured in the present by a certain attitude towards forms of authority. But even this behaviour rejects the notion that regulation is abstracted from obedience. There is no registered effect of distance between orders of action.

However, for a few inmates at Bomana, enmity operates rather differently, that is as a problem that denies the possibility adversaries might exchange actions and perspectives. These are the men deemed a 'safety risk', the handful of informers, ex-warders and in particular ex-policemen who staff believe face a real threat of injury or violent death in the main cells. Locked up with inmate boys in the juvenile wing, the only sector of the gaol whose compound gate is kept permanently locked and guarded, they exist quite literally in a realm set apart. When I was at Bomana, this wing was popularly known as 'Iraq' by prisoners and warders alike; the reference, only a couple of years after the First Gulf War, meant to signal the exceptional level of animosity felt towards these isolated convicts and remand prisoners. For juveniles the label was a joke to play on, allowing them to address the warder in charge of the wing, for instance, as 'Saddam'. But for their adult cellmates, it was deadly serious. Unlike other inmates, who imagine themselves participating in the definitions and transactions between adversaries, whether as agents responding to actions or as subjects indexing them, these men claim to have enmity thrust upon them. They are just the objects of hatred, the target of assault. Indeed, the adult prisoners of Iraq do nothing. Security fears mean they cannot join work parties, play football or touch rugby with other inmates or leave the juvenile wing to take part in Christmas, New Year or Independence Day celebrations. In this regard, they experience a scale-shift of sorts, not with the state but between themselves and the rest of the prison population, who hate without evincing a relation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I would like to thank my anonymous reviewer, and in particular the editors of this special volume, Andrew Lattas and Knut Rio, who invited me to contribute. For their comments and useful criticism of the paper, I am also grateful to Tony Crook, Melissa Demian, Simon Harrison, Anthony Pickles, Shari Sabeti and Alice Street. A very early version of the paper benefitted from the feedback of colleagues at the St Andrews-Bergen Pacific Workshop, and a later version from the comments of those attending the Melanesian Research Seminar at the British Museum. But as always, the bulk of my thanks must go to the prisoners and warders at Bomana gaol, with whom I worked and from whom I learnt so much.

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NOTES

(1.) For Oram (1976: 229), writing about policing in Port Moresby in the 1970s, the failure to accept policemen as agents of good order is a direct consequence of the historical profile of the Constabulary in Papua New Guinea. According to him, their proscribed role has been almost completely repressive. The problem has been that the Constabulary were a 'ruler-appointed police', historically at a remove from the public and untrained to act at the community level. It has been very difficult, for instance, for urban residents to summon the police when an offence or injury against them has occurred (230).

(2.) Over the border in West Papua or Irian Jaya, Indonesian police are also valued and feared by Melanesian peoples primarily as particular kinds of violent actors (Cf. Rutherford 1999, Stasch 2001).

(3.) Another way of rendering the process of gang elicitation and the apparent lack of social organization among gang mates is to highlight the non-denominating status of gang names. As Wagner (1991:163) states, in Melanesian societies 'names are but names', they exist on their own terms and not just as designating categories for social groups and individuals. Indeed, persons appear as instantiations of the names they identify; in a sense they represent the name rather than the name representing them. So inmates are Koboni or Bomai or Mafia; their actions index the gang name, which embodies them. In this regard, names differentiate or 'section' (1991 : 164) relations, acting as a 'device for setting up boundaries' (Wagner, 1974: 107) by contrasting one name with another. Although group-making is not the purpose of gang activity, the act of raising or lowering a gang name has the effect of bringing a group or body of men into being.

(4.) The notion of police as enemies with whom one competes or exchanges blows is in marked contrast to the way Indonesian police are figured by Melanesian peoples in West Papua or Irian Jaya. Among the Korowai, for instance, Stash (2001) observes that the violence of Indonesian policemen is presented as radically non transactional; unlike the violence of witches and the violence of witch executions, which for them has conventional relational outcomes. In this regard, police violence appears unique and 'new' in form. There is no equivalent sense of newness attached to the violence of police among prisoners at Bomana.

(5.) Monsell-Davis (1993) provides one of the first studies of wantokism in public and professional life in urban Papua New Guinea. He highlights the role of wantok obligations in employment selections and promotions and documents the rise of the notion of a critique of wantokism as a critque of government corruption. Merlan and Rumsey (1991:211) note the tensions among the people of the Nebilyer valley of the Highlands between the notion of government (gavman) and law (lo), fixed to an idea of 'universal parity', and the idea of the 'wantok system' and segementary identities with which they are seen to be in conflict.

(6.) Pentecostal and Adventist churches also present themselves in opposition to the traditional geographical division of Christian churches in Papua New Guinea, a situation that goes back to British and German colonisation in the late nineteenth century, when the two territories were carved up into agreed spheres of denominational influence (see Wetherell 1977). For gang boys to choose to convert to these new churches in Bomana is also a radical act because it contravenes the church affiliation of their kin and home areas.

(7.) Anthropologists working in Papua New Guinea among those belonging to Revival or Charismatic Christian movements also identify a concern to watch or expel sinful behaviours and to locate the agency of Satan. Robbins (1995: 214), for instance, records that the Urapmin people of West Sepik province now think of themselves as a Christian society. They are especially concerned to monitor desire through 'spirit discos' or dances in which men and women try and get violently possessed by the Holy Spirit in order to cleanse themselves of sin (217). Robbins (1998:311) argues that successful possession in spirit discos provides them with evidence that they have reached a lawful Christian kind of state of being. He claims that they aim to achieve a state of desirelessness (313).

(8.) The Adventist and Pentecostal inmate argument for diminished criminal responsibility is to me oddly resonant of the kinds of arguments put forward by early colonial officers during the period of Pacification in Papua New Guinea. As Fitzpatrick (1992) highlights, British and Australian colonial judges regularly distinguished between degrees of criminal responsibility when sentencing offenders. Those from areas deemed unpacified and without extensive contact with the 'White man' were treated as less culpable than those from areas nearer settlements or stations and with longer history of contact. In this legal code, the ultimate reward of 'civilisation' was the right to be tried and punished on the same terms as the colonizing subject.

(9.) In February of 1995, during the middle of my fieldwork, national newspapers announced that for the first time since 1954 a judge had sentenced someone convicted of murder to the death penalty (see Reed 2003:169-172). Reports stated that the condemned man was Charles Bongapa Ombusu, a gang big boy who was arrested and tried in Popondetta, the administrative centre of Oro province. Not long after, Ombusu was transferred to Bomana's Maximum Security Institution in order to await his appeal before the Supreme Court. His arrival sparked much discussion among the Christian inmates I knew. Over the ensuing days and months, they debated the appropriateness of this sentence and the general principle of the government's right to take life. As many predicted at the time, the penalty was never carried out; instead Ombusu's sentence was quashed and a retrial ordered.