Number-One Enemy: Police, Violence and the Location of Adversaries in a Papua New Guinean Prison

In this essay, I aim to explore how prisoners at Bomana in PNG, 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’.