Deviance, Punishment and Logics of Subjectification during Apartheid: Insane, Political and Common-law Prisoners in a South African Gaol

Abstract

In 1994, with the upcoming first non-racial democratic elections in South Africa, riots broke out in numerous prisons throughout the country. Common-law prisoners, political inmates who had not yet been granted amnesty and offenders kept in psychiatric hospitals claimed their right to vote, challenging in the same process the boundaries of South African citizenship, which was being redefined at the time. This article focuses on Pollsmoor Prison and on the Maximum Security Ward of Valkenberg Mental Hospital, both located in the Western Cape. Punishment is defined as the expression of a distinct regime of power-knowledge disseminated by local authorities such as judges and psychiatrists. The aim is to explore the extent to which the implementation of the categories of insane, political and criminal prisoners during apartheid was based on the delimitation of deviancy as issued by diverse authorities of power. These discursive categories were performative, to the extent that they described, defined and created their object in the same movement. They also constituted the framework in which resistance and initiative could be formulated within a total institution. This article therefore analyses, from the end of the 1960s to the democratic transition in the 1990s, how the apartheid regime tried to govern by circumscribing the subjectivity of the non-white populations through the use of intricate dynamics of punishment.