Confronting Silences Haunting Guyana’s Juvenile Justice System

Confronting Silences Haunting Guyana’s Juvenile Justice System ABSTRACTFollowing abolition in British Guiana, laws were passed to control the movement and labour of the formerly enslaved and the indentured. Children were among those convicted of breaking these laws,with some being detained in reformatories. Independence in 1966 saw the extension with modifications of these colonial laws. Into the 21stcentury, children were still being detained for colonial era crimes such as ‘wandering’. Yet the connections between the colonial and post-colonial treatment of juveniles in Guyana are hardly known. Framed by hauntology and Caribbean feminist criminology this paper addresses those silences by drawing on little used archival sources.