Pyrrhic defeat: Stigma attached to ‘street criminals’ distracts attention away from the crimes of the rich and politically powerful. Photo: Brenton Geach/Gallo Images
“Every society deserves the criminals it begets,” wrote Emma Goldman (1869-1940), the infamous American-Russian anarchist revolutionary and political activist.
If we think long and hard about the phenomenon of stigma against ex-offenders in South Africa, we might realise that despite all the wara-wara, it cannot be justified on reasonable grounds.
One way to understand the problem with stigma in the context of the fight against crime is that the stigma operating against ex-offenders is a life sentence and therefore does not pass constitutional muster under South African law.
Proportionality of sentencing is well entrenched in our law and with stigma following ex-offenders after their release from incarceration, the principle of proportionality of sentencing is violated.
For example, it does not matter if your sentence was two years for an economic crime or 20 for murder and armed robbery, the moment you are released from prison your sentence becomes indeterminate for the rest of your life because of the stigma, resulting in economic and social ostracism, discrimination and marginalisation.
In social philosophy, this phenomenon has evolved in a debate about the nature of a society in which stigma drives the discrimination and marginalisation visited on vilified groups such as but not limited to ex-offenders.
The debate referred to is whether a society is healthy and crime is a pathology or whether, on the contrary, the society itself is sick and the pathology (crime) is just a symptom of the whole, diseased organism.
The former idea is known as functionalism while the latter is known as interactionalism, which views crime not as an objective entity but rather as “a socially constructed phenomenon”.
Consider, for example, this wonderfully illustrative passage from Ruth First’s very readable account in 117 Days (1965, Penguin), which illustrates the problem with functionalism. The passage relates to her extended spell in solitary confinement in one of Johannesburg’s police stations during high apartheid.
“[I]t was Friday night, police-raid night. Pickup vans and kwela-kwelas, policemen in uniform, detectives in plain clothes were combing locations and hostels, backyards and shebeens to clean the city of ‘crime,’ and the doors of Marshall Square stood wide open to receive the haul of the dragnet.”
Indeed, is crime not perhaps a normal reaction to abnormal conditions? Does this vivid description by Ruth First of a sick society at the height of a deeply discriminatory phase in its development trajectory remind us of a diseased organism or merely a pathology of an otherwise healthy one? By analogy, I argue that South African society, having a stigmatising shaming culture, is criminogenic as a whole.
Stigma is “criminogenic” and “counterproductive”, in the apt words of Australian criminologist John Braithwaite and drives up recidivism and crime rates. South Africa has one of the highest rates of reoffending in the world, at 84-94%, with Japan sitting at 48%, the United States at 77% and Finland at 31%.
In the words of Michel Foucault, perhaps the West’s most articulate philosopher of punishment, stigma is nothing if not torture, because it serves no purpose as it is indeterminate. Punishment must be terminate[d] (meaning it must have an end to it) to serve any appreciable rehabilitative purpose. If stigma against this group cannot be justified on the grounds suggested, it raises the question as to why it exists at all.
A few reasons have been advanced by sociologist Erving Goffman and one strikes me as being correct. He tenders the view that stigma is an effective way to exclude the marginalised from the competition for resources, because stigma disastrously circumscribes their life chances and prospects.
In his important monograph Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoilt Identity (1963), Goffman defines stigma as “the central feature of the stigmatised individual’s situation in life … It is a question of … ‘acceptance’.”
Stigma against ex-offenders, even though unjustifiable on constitutional grounds, is vital to maintain the façade of the fight against crime in South Africa. Stigma serves the important task of cementing criminal careers and preventing the re-integration of ex-offenders into mainstream society.
Without stigma to drive ex-offenders away from mainstream society and into the arms of criminal subcultures, crime and especially recidivism would be under control. This cannot be allowed to happen because it would result in appreciable results in the fight against crime. Reiman’s Pyrrhic Defeat Theory predicts that the ruling class will not allow this to happen. By the “ruling class”, in this context, I mean the wealthy and the politically connected in South African society.
Jeffrey Reiman, a conflict criminologist based in the US, explores his Pyrrhic defeat theory in his provocatively titled book The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Prison.
Whereas a Pyrrhic victory refers to a victory that is achieved at such costs that it amounts to a victory only in name, a defeat of the same magnitude would mean that it’s a defeat in name only and one that amounts to a victory. According to the Pyrrhic defeat theory, the objective of the so-called fight against crime is not to succeed, but to fail. Stigma against ex-offenders ties in perfectly with this end.
If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, rest assured that that is what it is, but with the crucial difference that it is a justifiable conspiracy.
The whole point of Reiman’s Pyrrhic defeat theory is that it explains that the fight against “crime” (meaning the crimes committed by the poor and the marginalised) cannot be allowed to succeed because it would shift attention away from the so-called street crimes of the poor to the (perhaps more serious and damaging) crimes of the wealthy and the politically connected.
As Dutch criminologist Willem de Haan contends, “What we need is not a better theory of crime, but a more powerful critique of crime.”
In this, the general population has unknowingly been co-opted to stigmatise and marginalise ex-offenders, fatally, to their own detriment. No wonder Emma Goldman said presciently that every society deserves the criminals it begets.
Dr Casper Lötter is a conflict criminologist affiliated with North-West University’s School of Philosophy (Potchefstroom).