| Summary: | Crime in South Africa is a trenchant feature of post-apartheid South Africa with economic and
political causes and reciprocal effects. Recognised as a legacy of apartheid, it is a problem
variously tied to poverty and a moral deficiency, thus acting as a favourite decoy to evince
indignation and innocence. Between institutional and structural forms of violence, criminal
violence is singled out as a social scourge that only tougher punishment will address until a
moral regeneration and national development succeeds. Thus stripped of its structural origins
and reduced to an individualised culpability, it becomes the whetting stone for a reinvigorated
Calvinism. Freedom has indeed delivered a new Jerusalem to South Africa - as cleaved by
violence and repression.
This report looks at how crime, having been a feature in the making of the state at its frontier,
continues to modulate the rule of law. If the democratic breakthrough in 1994 represents the
opening of a frontier - and crime its expression - the war on crime represents its closure. The
measures taken to control crime are racially selective, the Bill of Rights withstanding, and
apartheid relations are reproduced. Prevailing practices of re-integrating convicted offenders
echo the role of missionaries in returning freed slaves to bondage. In a project that started
with the intent to glean from offenders a political form - an element of resistance in their
actions - a more ambiguous figure emerges.
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