When Prison Becomes Safer than Freedom: Mutual Entrapment in Prison Graduates

Abstract

This study examines how Efo Kodjo Mawugbe’s play Prison Graduates dramatizes the predicament of the postcolonial Ghanaian state, in which freedom outside the prison proves more threatening than confinement within it. The purpose of the research was to move beyond existing satirical readings of the play and to interpret its central motif of “Acquired Prison Traumatic Syndrome” as a metaphor for national dependency. Adopting a qualitative design, the study employed close textual analysis of selected scenes, speeches, and stage directions, which were interpreted through the lens of postcolonial theory, drawing on the concepts of neocolonialism and the psychology of dependency. The analysis revealed that the play stages a condition of mutual entrapment, in which failed state institutions (the cash-and-carry hospital, the prosperity-gospel pulpit, and the extortionate embassy) and a citizenry shaped by them together make the prison cell the most rational refuge available. It further found that the youthful urge to migrate functions as another symptom of this entrapment rather than an escape from it. The study concluded that the play presents sustainable development as contingent on transforming both the institutions and the dependent consciousness they cultivate.