Diana Gordon. Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. xiii + 382 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00 Cloth. $27.95. Paper.

Abstract

Diana Gordon. Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. xiii + 382 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00 Cloth. $27.95. Paper. This is a good book on an important subject. The issue of pandemic criminality is the common dark side of transitions to democracy. (One of the many virtues of the book-all too rare in discussions of South Africa-is its awareness of similar problems in other countries.) In all democracies the question of which responses will, on the one hand, reduce crime, and, on the other, ensure that the criminal justice system adequately addresses crime are complex. a society in which exaggerated hopes accompanied the apparent miracle of its transition from the horror of apartheid to the accomplishment of the human rights state, South Africa has had to face an efflorescence of ongoing criminal violence for which few were prepared. The new constitutional bill of rights contains extensive provisions to ensure that the oppressive policing and legal practices of apartheid criminal justice are repudiated. The landmark decision of the Constitutional Court declaring the death penalty unconstitutional set the tone for a completely new approach to a democratized criminal justice. New policing and new courts, both operating within a human rights framework, were envisaged. The weakest parts of the book are the two early chapters on pre-apartheid and apartheid justice, which deploy the customary narrative of racist evils; the title of chapter 3 (Bitter Fruit from Poison seeds) sums up the basic argument advanced. While Gordon flirts with the idea that data regarding crime increases are not reliable, and that increases may be due to increased reporting, she does conclude that crime is rampant-with women and children victimized in appalling numbers (93). Indeed, it is violence against persons that characterizes South African crime. Essentially the author attributes crime to the structural inequalities bequeathed by apartheid, and as these conditions persist she envisages no early change, despite thrilling democratization (95). There are also the connections between the violent political resistance to apartheid and its carryover into criminal violence. And she claims an analogy with child abuse: As abusing adults often reflect experience as abused children, those who are violent in South Africa have lived in the shadow of an abusive regime, even if they have not experienced its violence directly and physically (100). …