'Like Some Rough Beast Slouching Towards Bethlehem to be Born': A Historical Perspective on the Institution of the Prison in South Africa, 1976-2004

Super, Gail

doi:10.1093/bjc/azq063

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This article adds further support to research showing that ideas such as justice and rehabilitation are ‘more malleable and multifaceted than is often recognized’ (Goodman, 2012: 439) and that penal ideas develop and evolve depending on the wider social order (Barker, 2017; Super, 2011). While Ireland did not descend into a punitive penal culture in the 1970s like its US and UK neighbours, nor did it commit to corrective penal welfarism.…”

Section: Pastoral Penalitysupporting

confidence: 53%

Pastoral penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment

Brangan

2019

Theoretical Criminology

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The Republic of Ireland is said to be an exception within Anglophone penal history, where it resisted the punitive turn of the 1970s and a more pragmatic and dispassionate penal politics prevailed. Even during the 1970s, when Ireland displayed tendencies towards penal welfarism, this is argued to have been more rhetorical mimicry than commitment to the principles of offender transformation. This article first interrogates these claims by providing an in-depth historical and sociological analysis of penal culture and transformation in the prison system in Ireland in the 1970s. By conducting this analysis in conversation with penological theory, in this case penal welfarism, the study presents a new concept of parsimonious penal power: pastoral penality. Pastoral penality was a more humane penal culture that emerged during the 1970s in Ireland. It is hoped that these historical and theoretical contributions developed throughout this paper contribute to the shifting and deepening of our USA and UK-centric understandings of punishment history and patterns.The key features of penal welfarism are presented first. This is followed by an overview of the main conventions in Irish penal and social historiography. The substantive historical findings from the research are then outlined. The evidence reveals a counter-narrative of an intentional and highly principled penal transformation led by those who held the power to imprison. The concept of pastoral penality is then forwarded. This was a more humane and empathetic approach to imprisonment that reflects Ireland's socio-cultural and political context, shaped by a conservative political ethos, Catholic values and a communitarian class structure. A wider lens then permits us to also to see that this form of penality was contingent on Ireland's distinctive field of social control, however. The article concludes by acknowledging the structural and practical limits of pastoral penal welfarism but emphasising that while pastoral penality is non-abolitionist it operates with a deep scepticism of the prison and an awareness of the harms it causes.

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Section: Pastoral Penalitysupporting

confidence: 53%

Pastoral penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment

Brangan

2019

Theoretical Criminology

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“…This literature can help us rethink our taken-for-granted penal concepts. In this diverse array of scholarship, we see the importance of examining differences in meanings and practice of prisoner categorisation and rehabilitation (Brangan, 2019b, Super, 2011), dimensions of prison control (Birckbeck, 2011), the collective nature of prison life (Darke, 2018) and prison climate (Martin et al., 2014). Some combination of these kinds of middle-range concepts would help capture the mixed enterprise that makes up a prison system and gives it a distinctive national character.…”

Section: Developing a New Comparative Terrainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology

Brangan

2020

Punishment & Society

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It is now common in the sociology of punishment to lament that comparative penology has not matured as an area of research. While there have been seminal works in the comparative canon, their conceptual tools tend to be drawn from grand narratives and macro-structural perspectives. Comparative researchers therefore lack concepts that can help capture the complexity of penality within a single nation, limiting the cross-national perspective. Why is this relative lack of comparative refinement still the case? This article investigates this question by looking specifically at penal exceptionalism, a concept central to comparative penology. While punitiveness as a comparative and descriptive category has been critiqued, its converse, penal exceptionalism remains prevalent but undertheorised. Examining exceptionalism reveals that it is not merely the macro-structural approach to comparison that has limited the development of cross-national sociology of punishment, but the Anglocentric assumptions, which are the bedrock of comparative penology. In this essay, I argue that penal exceptionalism versus punitiveness is an Anglocentric formulation. These taken-for-granted assumptions have become so central to the comparative enterprise that they act as a barrier to developing new innovative comparative frameworks and concepts. The article concludes by suggesting some methodological strategies that are intended as a way of helping comparative penology to expand its toolkit and support the ongoing development of more equitable criminological knowledge.

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“…The structure of the police became less militaristic, a change that was accompanied by pledges of greater transparency and accountability, new uniforms, and the change of the prison system's name to the Department of Correctional Services. 19 Most important, DCS adopted a new mission that no longer attributed illegal activity to the "born criminality" of blacks-that is, an inherited racial-biological, evolutionary defect that the Italian eugenicist and criminologist Cesar Lombroso had incorrectly identified in the late nineteenth century. 20 More recently, the pervasive sense of fear and instability in the country has been attributed to the emergence of a new class of organized, intelligent, and utterly immoral black gangsters.…”

Section: Gangstermentioning

confidence: 99%

Serious Fun at Sun City: Theatre for Incarcerated Women in the “New” South Africa

Biggs¹

2015

Theat Surv

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Women have been largely invisible in crime discourse in South Africa; they have never been conceived of as either the primary authors or objects of the law. Yet according to the Republic of South Africa Department of Correctional Services (DCS), they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the prison population today. In the eight years following democratic elections in 1994, DCS reports that the number of women behind bars grew by over 31 percent. From 2008 to 2012 alone, the women's prison population rose by 10 percent while the number of men behind bars declined. These increases are not fully attributable to an escalation in women's illicit behavior. Instead, shifts in policing and sentencing policies now mandate longer sentences for crimes for which women are most likely to be convicted—both aggressive and non-violent, often poverty-related, offenses such as theft (shoplifting, robbery, burglary, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement), narcotics (trafficking, sale, distribution), and sex work.

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'Like Some Rough Beast Slouching Towards Bethlehem to be Born': A Historical Perspective on the Institution of the Prison in South Africa, 1976-2004

Cited by 6 publications

References 7 publications

Pastoral penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment

Pastoral penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment

Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology

Serious Fun at Sun City: Theatre for Incarcerated Women in the “New” South Africa

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