In Sierra Leone, the lines that are supposed to lie between rebel and civilian, sister and enemy, child and combatant, have, in this small countryí¢â‚¬â„¢s tumultuous history, become difficult to identify with any certainty. The country continually manages to slip through the dichotomous í¢â‚¬Ëœwar and peaceí¢â‚¬â„¢ categories with which the international community attempts to define it with. Most often, it feels as though this patch of land exists in a space in-between.

While categorized as being í¢â‚¬Å“at peaceí¢â‚¬ , Sierra Leone remains uneasily surrounded by Guinea and Liberia, continues to play host to a handful of lingering UN peacekeepers, all the while garnering the bleak recognition by outsiders as a failed state. It teeters along the bottom edge of various lists, currently sitting, for example, as the second poorest country in the world according the UN Human Development Index. Amidst this contradictory stable disorder of daily life there is an attempt to revive the countryí¢â‚¬â„¢s institutions and entrench the lines that have become so faded. And thus, while the countryí¢â‚¬â„¢s six million citizens continue to eek out an existence in the newfound stability, another population faces entirely different forms of violence that seem to thrive on this state of in-betweeness.

The walls are grey, the bars are grey, and some of the uniforms are too. Pademba Road Prison is the countryí¢â‚¬â„¢s maximum security prison, sitting in Freetown on a dusty stretch of road that is incessantly overflowing with boys selling newspapers and cell phone chargers while girls sell cold water in plastic bags, carried in baskets on their heads. The prison itself, built in the early 1900s, sits quietly amidst the daily cacophony that surrounds it. When the front gate closes, the quiet inside reaches you. While kids dressed in bright school uniforms walk past the walls outside, the prisoners organise themselves into classes, teaching English, reading worn copies of Shakespeare and the Bible, and solving Sudoku puzzles drawn with chalk on the walls, inside. Some of the male prisonersí¢â‚¬â„¢ cells are decorated with sketches of the outside world and paintings of Bob Marley. Fist fights and angry exchanges unpredictably punctuate the silence as expressions of frustration bubble over.

In the hands of a partially resurrected legal system and the attendant discourses forged out of the inheritances of colonialism and autocratic rule, these prisoners exist in a parallel reality on the other side of the wall. The overbearing grey walls of Pademba Prison definitively demarcate the lines between citizen and criminal and the prisoners live within a contentious realm of legal narratives that renders an undeniable existence of captivity. The basis of arrest, detention and conviction are all seemingly enacted more according to the entrenchment of corruption and the extension of state power than any imagined sense of justice in Sierra Leone. The international community has been quick with its praise of the re-establishment of this system; a system deemed to indicate the legitimacy of the state rather than its weakness. This institutional legal realm that has evolved as the conflict has receded is one in which the police are given large discretion, detainees are desperately poor and without proper legal representation, and the courts without enough qualified judges. This system of law and order has become a set of narrative fictions whose consequences are as absolute as they are abusive.

Samuel is inside Pademba Road Prison because he was found to be selling things on the street in a forbidden area. Kumba is here because she is unable to repay a debt she claims she did not make. Omrie is here because he was accused of trying to overthrow the government. Whether in prison rightly or wrongly, somehow, once inside, these different stories all mean the same thing: all are faced with the impossible task of negotiating a system that was never meant to serve them.

While some defining lines are beginning to reemerge in Sierra Leone and the country turns hopefully towards upcoming elections, the transition to peace has also left the country exposed to partial legal narratives. Such discourses, expressed by a legal system built on insecure foundations, separate citizen from criminal and bring a fictional sense of order. This illusion, embraced by outsiders eager to see the re-establishment of a functioning state and a government in need of control, recedes when the reality inflicted by these unchecked legal processes is visible. This constructed reality is one that delivers exclusion, manifest inside Pademba Road, where the wait is interminable, grievance brews and the silent pictures sketched onto the walls demand the recognition of their creators. Just take a look over the other side of the wall.