NCJ Number
132913
Editor(s)
D Hansson,
D V Z Smit
Date Published
1990
Length
285 pages
Annotation
Intellectual traditions underpinning South Africa's criminal justice system include legal reformist criminology, Afrikaner nationalist criminology, and critical criminology.
Abstract
Each tradition can be linked to specific developments in criminal justice administration. Legal reformist criminology was firmly rooted in the reorganization of the South African State after 1910. From the 1920s on, South Africanism was challenged by an emerging Afrikaner nationalism which emphasized the social and economic impoverishment of the Afrikaner people. Unlike legal reformists, Afrikaner nationalist criminologists were intellectuals and not practitioners. Critical criminology emerged with the founding of the Institute of Criminology in Cape Town in 1977. This institute included representatives of the judiciary, prosecuting authorities, police, the prison service, and various welfare organizations. It was clearly designed to propose criminal justice and penal reforms. Book chapters look at specific criminological issues in South Africa in the context of the preceding intellectual traditions. The first chapter contends that mainstream academic criminology has become implicated in the strategies of the State in general and of the military in particular to maintain order. Subsequent chapters look at vigilantism and the policing of African townships, the history of the South African police, and death squads and police culture in relation to policing political opponents. Other chapters examine capital punishment, expert testimony on collective violence and on community attitudes toward sentencing, corporal punishment, community responses to police abuse of power, and the resurgence of urban street gangs in Cape Town during the late 1980s. References, footnotes, and figures