When Law Becomes Violence: A Mbembean Reading of the Price of Survival and System-Made Criminality in The Prisoner

Abstract

This study analyzes how systemic violence works in Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisoner (2013). This paper challenges the narrative that corruption arises from individual moral failure. It asserts that in the postcolonial system, criminality is not a choice but a requirement for survival. Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s theoretical framework from On the Postcolony, specifically the concepts of Commandement, Conviviality, and Zombification, this paper examines how the indigenous state has recycled colonial tools of oppression to hunt its own people. The analysis demonstrates that the state functions through a “regime of exception,” by weaponizing the law and forcing law enforcement into a convivial relationship with the criminal underworld. Through a close reading of the protagonists’ trajectories, the study argues that “zombification,” a state of moral paralysis, becomes the inevitable requirement for physical existence in the Postcolony. Ultimately, the study concludes that in a world where law and crime are indistinguishable, it is impossible to label the system as a failure or the individual as a criminal. In such system, there are no true heroes or villains, only survivors who must participate in the very system that oppresses them.