Semiotic and Cognitive Landscapes: Construction of Young Inmates’ Identity in a Correctional Facility in Eswatini by Dr Virginia Thontea Dlamini-Akintola

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HTTP://DOI.ORG/10.33234/SSR.18.4

 

Correctional institutions have shifted their focus from punitive processes to those that prioritise rehabilitation of offenders to enhance inmates’ successful reintegration into communities. In the last ten years, the Kingdom of Eswatini has been working to strengthen programmes in the young persons’ prison aimed at rehabilitating the incarcerated youth through formal education. However, such a programme fails to address the role played by semiotic and cognitive landscapes in the construction of young offenders’ identities who are rehabilitated in this highly regulated context. The purpose of this paper therefore is to present the semiotic and cognitive landscapes constructed in the youth’s facility from a sociolinguistic perspective. The article is drawn from a broader doctoral thesis, premised on the ethnographic study which investigated ‘The discursive construction of the young offenders’ identity through narratives’ (Dlamini-Akintola 2019). The paper is humanities’ based art-based research, and was used to highlight aspects of the landscapes that contribute to the young offenders’ discursive construction of identity, which is an important variable in the rehabilitation of incarcerated youth. The results show that semiotic and cognitive landscapes contribute to the success or failure of rehabilitation through their role in the discursive construction of identity by young offenders. The retributive features of this punitive environment create an ongoing tension between rehabilitation and retribution, which affects the construction of young inmates ‘moral careers’ (Goffman 1961).

Key words: multimodal narratives, identity construction, semiotic &cognitive landscapes, rehabilitation, young offenders.