Moralizing Security: 'Corrections' and the Post-Apartheid Prison

Abstract

Despite its historical commitment to the project of freedom, post-apartheid governments in South Africa have not shied away from significant use of the prison, especially as a way of curbing the ‘crime wave’ that emerged in the course of South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. Through an analysis of policy and practice in post-apartheid prisons, this article argues that ‘morali ty’ and the reification of family values have come to stand in for more radical forms of social action in the production of a non-racial state. Moral reason, it is argued, cannot but stand in a relation of superficial idealism to the deeper dialectical issues at stake in the project of anti-apartheid reconstruction and to the symptom of criminality.

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