Governing through Crime in South Africa: The Politics of Race and Class in Neoliberalizing Regimes. By Gail Super. Dorchester: Ashgate, 2013. 182 pp. $98.96, cloth.

Abstract

Governing through Crime in South Africa: The Politics of Race and Class in Neoliberalizing Regimes. By Gail Super. Dorchester: Ashgate, 2013. 182 pp. $98.96, cloth.In ways more similar than different, crime policies in South Africa after end of formal apartheid play out in a field where poor are not well represented and indeed where punitive penal policies absurdly reinforce inequality of society. So argues Gail Super in Governing through Crime in South Africa. Super's raw material in this well-researched book comes from her focus on official criminology-state discourses about crime and criminality (pp. 6-7). These discourses are a form of communication and are themselves performative. Using this material, Super shows how politics of race and class in post-apartheid South Africa under conditions of neo-liberalism have led to a place where criminal justice and prisons policy appear to exhibit more continuity than change-despite new democratic government led for more than twenty years now by former liberation movement, African National Congress (ANC).As a historical case study spanning late apartheid, transition, and post-apartheid South Africa, Super's work perhaps is inherently inclined toward examining continuities of new with old. While this fits with much of best recent scholarship on crime and policing in South Africa (Altbeker 2005; Hornberger 2013), others call for an emphasis on discontinuity (Steinberg 2014). In any case, Super's analysis is nuanced and careful. It is not simply old wine in new bottles. Working at messy and fertile intersection of crime and governance, Super refreshes and complicates simple distinction that sees apartheid as bad and post-apartheid as better (or perhaps just not-sobad).As even a casual reader of major newspapers in South Africa would be aware, crime and its management have become a central issue in governance of post-apartheid South Africa. Productively drawing on Foucauldian themes, one chapter follows directly on Super's previously published work on spectacle of crime in post-apartheid South Africa (Super 2010). She details how relationship between crime and politics changed as African National Congress went from a liberation movement to a ruling party. Likewise, relationship between crime and race changed as blacks moved from oppressed to governing majority-Super has less to say about gender. In new South Africa, crime has become subjected to more intensive measurement techniques but simultaneously has become an object through which governing occurs. Thus halt to publication of crime statistics directed by ANC Minister of Safety and Security in 2000 justifies Super's contention that the ANC government used denial and refusal to divulge information as a tactic of rule-just as NP [National Party] government had done before it (p. 39).Continuity also figures in discussion in Governing through Crime in South Africa about country's shift to neoliberal macroeconomic policies. Super dates start of neoliberal policies in South Africa to early 1980s, under white National Party government: a shift from racial Fordism to privatization (p. 9). Post-apartheid, Super describes how new democratic government has unexpectedly taken stances in favor of imprisonment and without mention of or attention to structural causes of crime. In this engagement with neoliberalism and its effects, Super follows Jonathan Simon in seeing not only repressive side of crime control but also its softer and enabling effects (Simon 2007).Indeed, for Super, continuities continue. Where others have depicted a shift from early post-apartheid days of community based crime prevention to a later (from late 1990s or 2000) era of getting tough, she emphasizes linkages and points of intersection in both language about criminals and in penal complex. …