ABSTRACT
Crime and punishment is a subject that has continued to stimulate scholarly debates. Arguments abound on whether after committing a crime and being punished one is reformed or not. On the contrary, there appears to be a paucity of scholarly engagement on matters concerning unfair arrests, detentions, or unwarranted torture, especially in the Kenyan context. This chapter argues that the police as presented in Benjamin Garth Bundeh’s memoir use torture to deride and coerce suspects to confess, then they prosecute them and when convicted, the victims suffer unprecedented psychological pain that leaves them with traumatic memories of the legal process. The study borrows from trauma theory and provides an alternate perspective of examining prison writing in Kenya. The chapter contributes to existing studies on prison literature by demonstrating the interplay between denied justice and psychological trauma in literature.
