Abstract
Comment and analysis - The crisis of criminal justice in South Africa
Highlights
The crisis of criminal justice in South AfricaIn 2017, I delivered a lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) aimed at confronting a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime.[2]
During apartheid, prisons were referred to as ‘universities of crimes’ or ‘criminal headquarters’.3 The prison system, based on the Prisons Act 8 of 1959, was strictly segregated racially.[4]
In 2017, I delivered a lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) aimed at confronting a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime.[2]
Summary
In 2017, I delivered a lecture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) aimed at confronting a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime.[2]. The anguish of a vulnerable woman at the very University where the lecture was to be delivered having her life brutally ended, in unspeakably nightmarish moments, by the exertion over her of ghastly destructive male dominance, shocked us all to the core. It elicited a national outpouring of grief and rage – and, rightfully, a new demand for answers from our criminal justice system. The minimum sentencing regime is a misdirected, hugely costly and above all ineffective way of punishing criminals and dealing with crime It has been an extravagant mistake of science, understanding, and policy and social response. I find the reasons in our broken history, in incoherent decision-making in our present political leadership, institutional incompetence, and the fact that minimum sentences themselves, through their false promise, divert us from finding more efficient solutions
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