OPINION | The Thabo Bester prison break raises interesting questions about the negative effect of globalisation on the domestic management of crime.
To illustrate, I am of the view that the rationale for the privatisation drive regarding prisons, not only in this country, but worldwide, is closely linked to two global developments. The first is a growing international trend to punitively manage so-called “surplus populations” of the unemployed, homeless and hopeless by way of incarceration, which has succeeded in locking in the profit motive.
The second trend concerns how these “surplus populations” are managed. This is done by way of an American animal known as the “prison-industrial complex” and is another feasible reason for both prison expansion and privatisation. This PIC is crisplyWhile a person with the political stature ofargues, with reference to Bester’s escape, that “state institutions […] concerned with public security, are eroding, collapsing and generally dysfunctional.
Suttner’s point is well conceived, but at the tail end of late capitalism, I would suggest that the government’s incompetence is tied in, at least in part, with its complicity to the agenda of Big Business. Note, for example, that G4S’s to run Mangaung was entered into in 2000. Even though it was meant to expire in 2026, the department of correctional services has now retaken control of the prison.
This date would mean that my previous calculations on the timing of the emergence of the PIC in South Africa was wrong. In a scholarly paper, following up on a clue provided by the famous prison abolitionist,
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