Katja Franko Aas and Mary Bosworth (eds), The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Ana Aliverti |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474514532592 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Punishment & Society 16(5)
de-politicized specter of crime. In Chapters 3 and 4, Super explores the explan-
ations of crime and the constructions of criminality. Not surprisingly race is central
both before and after although in slightly different ways. While the normal story
often goes that socio-economic explanations were stronger in post-apartheid South
Africa, Super shows that this trend had begun before and that maybe it is not as
strong as parts of the public debate in post-apartheid South Africa would have us
believe. In Chapter 5, Super looks at the turn to community. Again, the turn had
occurred before the fall of apartheid and again it was probably more based on
management ideas than attempts to meaningfully include the South African popu-
lation in the fight against crime in the post-apartheid moment. In the final Chapter
6, Super explores the relationship between punishment and the body and she comes
up with some worrying questions. As the incarceration rate is higher today than
before, what does that say about the relationship between punishment, incarcer-
ation and democracy? Furthermore, post-apartheid South Africa stresses the shift
to rehabilitative forms of punishment. Again Super’s material suggests that these
changes had already begun before the end of apartheid. For Super, this does not
exonerate the apartheid regime or she does not fall in to the trap of saying that
ANC-driven policing has degenerated into apartheid policing. Rather, her analysis
suggests that we need to be careful not to reduce the social complexity of policing in
South Africa to facile notions of before or after and more or less of the same. As
she states at the end, we need to look at the flexible, unstable overlaying of various
rationalities and governmentalities that make up South African policing.
To conclude, Gail Super has written an important book about shifts and conti-
nuities in technologies and rationalities that have animated the politics of crime in
South Africa. In this way it complements other works by Anne-Marie Singh, Tony
Roshan Samara, Andre` Standing and myself. She brings to the table an understand-
ing that what happens in the world of policing is clearly related to global trends of
policing in the throes of neo-liberal governance. While it is sometimes difficult to be
sure in the...
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