Rac(e)ing Poverty and Punishment in South Africa, 1920–1970

Abstract

This paper unpacks the ways in which race and modernity shaped perceptions of crime, disorder, and poverty in South Africa by looking at how aspects of inequality and injustice were inscribed into discourses of disorder in the past. Historically, the issues of race and poverty in South Africa were often used in traditional urban settings to produce numerous images of urban crises. The paper is presented in four sections. The first section focuses on Michel Foucault's ideas on the nature of punishment in modern society and how correctional institutions regulate the lives of those deemed to be a “danger to modern society.” Foucault's ideas are set to provide an explanatory platform for the paper's overall analysis of penal practice in South Africa. The second section focuses on the interaction between the construction of mechanisms of racial hegemony in South Africa in the past and the development of a penal system that could harness and control the consequences of rapid social change. Punishment is here linked to four broad developments that emerged alongside the construction of a modernizing society. These developments included debates and processes that sought to respond to problems on indigency, links between punishment systems and understandings of racial mixing, the reliance on the authority of scientific interventions and programs of education to assess and address identified needs, and the belief in preparing subjects for work in order that they later not be a burden to the state. The third section addresses the ways in which the evolving punishment system in South Africa was both informed and constituted by academic criminological thought during the twentieth century. Dirk Van Zyl Smit has identified two criminological periods in the development of penal practice in South Africa after 1910, periods that he has characterized as “Legal Reformism” and “Afrikaner Nationalism.” He notes that the two periods and traditions interacted in complex ways to inform the development of social policy thereafter. For example, Van Zyl Smit notes that both traditions of criminological thinking assumed that the building of a new South African nation within the broader imperial framework would always only be based on “Afrikaners and English working together.” It was also assumed that indigent whites that committed crimes of serious social consequence did so only because there weren't enough social welfare programs in place to protect them from “falling into disrepute.” Using the key concepts prevalent in the first three sections, the fourth section briefly suggests how notions of color shaped and interacted with institutional provision and arrangements in the period 1945 to 1970.