What the Criminal Justice System Looks Like Across the Globe

In 2010, Jan Banning made a trip to Uganda to photograph prisons. A Dutch photographer, Banning had spent much of the previous decade traveling between eight different countries to document the lives of civil servants. Backgrounding that project was a more difficult subject that Banning found increasingly impossible to ignore: the criminal justice system.

Banning’s arrival in Uganda marked the beginning of his latest work, Law & Order: The World of Criminal Justice, which he completed in 2015 and recently published as a book. In it, he details the criminal justice systems in Uganda, France, Colombia, and the United States—countries selected to illustrate the varied codes of law and forms of government. Throughout the book, Banning’s photographs are punctuated by his personal reflections and information on the legal landscape of each country, provided by the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany.