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

This paper looks at official discourse on imprisonment under the apartheid and post-apartheid governments, comparing the ways that both regimes have justified the existence of the prison in South Africa. The period covered is from 1976 to 2004. The author shows how the ANC government has attempted to reinvent the prison as a means of establishing order in post-apartheid South Africa and that the demise of apartheid and advent of democracy have been accompanied by an exponential increase in long-term imprisonment. The paper tracks how the process of reform embarked on by the Nationalist Party Government from the late 1970s impacted upon prison practices. In the ‘new’ South Africa, a neo-liberal penality coexists with older disciplinary and sovereign strategies of penal governance in an unstable, contingent and erratic way. The old is very much part of the new. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]