The balance balance between integration and stigma could bring down South Africa's high rate of re-offending.
The debate on the possibilities and challenges of parole and rehabilitation in South Africa immediately brings to mind the words of Pat Carlen, former editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Criminology, that “[t]he concept of rehabilitation, by contrast, has been and still is exclusively focused upon the crimes of the poor and the powerless […] and [has very little to do with] those presently filling the prisons and who have never had anything to be rehabilitated to”.
Nonetheless, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has requested the urgent reform of South Africa’s parole system after, allegedly, alarming rates of recidivism (or reoffending) came to their attention. In reaction, Minister of Correctional Services Pieter Groenewald acknowledges the link between so-called failures in parole policy and gang activity in the Western Cape.
To his credit, the national commissioner of correctional services, Makgothi Samuel Thobakgale, inaugurated enhanced Risk and Probability Reports to support the parole board in its deliberations. The question is — does parole reform in South Africa amount to fact or fiction?
The DA has also weighed in on the issue. Writing on behalf of his party, MP Nicholas Gotsell (National Council of Provinces member on security and justice) contends on the DA’s website that: “The DA reiterates our call for an urgent overhaul of parole policy with a risk-based assessment system that factors in community impact and bars early release for violent and firearm-related offenders unless strict rehabilitation and reintegration conditions are met.”
Similarly, The department of correctional services has pledged to implement its Restorative Justice programme, which includes victim-offender dialogues and victim-offender mediation sessions. “Through these comprehensive reforms, the department of correctional services seeks to build a parole system that is not only more just and efficient but also places victims’ rights and community healing at its core.”
These initiatives are not unimportant but are a poor show if it’s meant to move the needle on rehabilitation and desistance from crime. It is the unexamined assumptions built into the DA’s argument and that of the department that I wish to interrogate in this piece. The recent furore over the promise and possibility of parole reform in South Africa should be contextualised as it seems to have lost direction in a forest of uproar and excitement.
To understand the enormity of the problem and the task ahead, it is necessary to first grasp the fundamental distinction between stigmatising shaming (found in South Africa and the US) and integrative shaming cultures (found in China, Japan and many African societies).
It is a worthwhile exercise exploring the features and differences between these two cultures as it is important to understand what impact they have on parole policy within that context. I explained the differences in a previous contribution, which I quote below (edited for clarity and context).
“All societies manage deviance through shame that results in either integration or stigma. Stigmatising condemns the offender, rather than the transgression committed, and this results in “criminogenic labelling”, which is “counterproductive” (to use the well-known Australian criminologist John Braithwaite’s words) to any project that wishes to promote rehabilitation and desistance. Integrative shaming, however, encourages reintegration by only condemning the criminal act and not the individual.”
Braithwaite, therefore, argues in his seminal contribution to restorative justice, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989), in favour of integrative shaming “as a tool to allure and inveigle the citizen to attend to the moral claims of the criminal law, to coax and caress compliance, to reason and remonstrate with him over the harmfulness of his conduct”.
In essence, the difference between these two cultures is that whereas stigma drives ex-offenders away from mainstream society, and thus boosts reoffending as a measure of survival, an integrative shaming culture does everything possible to resettle them sustainably by providing employment, accommodation and even encouraging marriage.
As a criminologist who devoted his PhD to the issue of the possibilities and challenges posed by the reintegration of former offenders in South Africa (a stigmatising shaming culture), based on the contemporary Chinese model (an integrative shaming culture), I am one of the few uniquely positioned to explore the matter.
For one, I concluded my doctorate on a compelling theme in comparative criminology with the thought that the greatest obstacle to sustainable reintegration of former offenders is the stigma which faces former offenders upon their release from prison. Stigma forecloses employment opportunities for former offenders and leads to social ostracism.
South Africa, for its part, exhibits a harsh stigmatising shaming culture and, considering the criminogenic effect of such an environment, it should not surprise us to learn that this country has one of the highest rates of reoffending in the world.
On the one hand, whereas China (the prime example of an integrative shaming culture) evinces recidivism rates of 22.7% (2019), Finland has a very acceptable 31% (with deincarceration at 53/100 000 in the general population). On the other hand, South Africa (harsh stigmatising shaming culture) has an unacceptably high 86 to 94% rate of reoffending (with incarceration at 259/100 000). Higher incarceration rates do not lead to safer communities, clearly.
Finland is a liberal democracy which, curiously, exhibits features of both integration and stigma and is a model South Africa could consider emulating with a view to adding integrative features to blunt the force of stigma.
I am always amazed to be reminded that South Africa is a country where at least 70% of its inhabitants profess to be Christian and yet there is such an enormous intolerance of former offenders who have served their time and are eager for reintegration.
Taking my cue from Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of religion, which doubles as a theory of culture, perhaps the observation is apt that the repression of this group ties in with the idea that guilt over the unresolved trauma caused by apartheid atrocities would not allow South Africans to show mercy to this stigmatised group. Are we condemned to suffer an endless return of the repressed?
This is the thought that strikes me as I read the DA’s Gotsell’s remark that: “The DA reiterates our call for an urgent overhaul of parole policy with a risk-based assessment system that factors in community impact and bars early release for violent and firearm-related offenders unless strict rehabilitation and reintegration conditions are met.”
If the rehabilitation paradigm is redundant in this country, as I argue that it is, does this mean that these offenders should never be released from incarceration?
The deeply unequal income and ownership disparities in post-apartheid South African society adds to the conundrum of stigma. In the words of Pat Carlen, editor of the British Journal of Criminology, “Prior to their imprisonment, [offenders] usually [have] been so economically and/or socially disadvantaged that they have nothing to which they can be rehabilitated.” The effects of this nothingness to rehabilitate to, added to the debilitating effects of stigma, renders the rehabilitation paradigm in societies with huge ownership and income inequality, such as that of South Africa, almost, if not entirely, redundant.
The dynamics of a stigmatising shaming culture is described by Michelle Alexander in her deeply insightful book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012), with the following words.
“The disturbing phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison, trapped by their second-class status, has been described by Loic Wacquant as a ‘closed circuit of perpetual marginality’. Hundreds of thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released again, only to find themselves in precisely the same circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope with the stigma of the prison label and their permanent pariah status.”
Efforts at resettlement are significantly hindered by the existing stigma threaded through our culture. Regardless of the parole policy in place, stigma continues to seriously impede rehabilitation efforts. Sadly, the debilitating effects of stigma do not begin when the offender is released but are already in place during incarceration, damaging offenders in complicated and significant ways. In a paper published more than 20 years ago, the American researchers Uggen, Manza & Behrens had already pointed out the rehabilitative benefits lost to stigma.
“The bitterness underlying these comments shows the flip side of the power of community reintegration: when stigma and rejection are the dominant experience [as is certainly the case in South Africa], the potentially restorative benefits of civic participation are lost.”
Even though the department of correctional services has formed “a dedicated task team to review the current parole system and produced a draft position paper”, these efforts will not result in much in the form of constructive improvements to the existing range of outcomes regarding so-called rehabilitative efforts unless the conditions inherent to this country’s harsh stigmatising shaming culture are addressed.
One way of doing so is to follow Finland’s model by roping in integrative measures (employment opportunities, accommodation) to blunt the effect of stigma’s most harmful effects, as I noted above. The aim is to reach a pragmatic archetype modelled on a hybrid society, such as is the case with Finland, which exhibits both stigmatising and integrative shaming features.
The excitement around the promise and possibility of parole reform in South Africa is indeed fiction as the route to success stories in rehabilitation and, by implication, positive outcomes for parole, does not, conversely, lie with the institution of parole but with the quality of offenders’ reception during their incarceration and, especially, once released from custody.
Dr Casper Lötter is a conflict criminologist affiliated with North-West University’s School of Philosophy.