IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/crimin/v64y2024i1p107-123..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Porous Penality and the Myth of Liberal Punishment: Lessons from South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Gail Super

Abstract

Drawing on Walter Benjamin, this paper discusses the relationships between law, violence, and punishment. The main argument I make is that state punishment is BOTH a violent and logically contradictory practice and that the state’s legal right to punish often spills over into extralegal penal violence, perpetrated by a range of actors against the racialized poor. I use the term penal violence to refer to all forms of violence which are aimed at enforcing law or punishing a perceived transgression of law or norms. The paper focuses on the infliction of penal violence in South Africa on/in three different scales and jurisdictions: Makwanyane and violence in prisons; police and prosecutorial violence; and extralegal civilian violence.

Suggested Citation

  • Gail Super, 2024. "Porous Penality and the Myth of Liberal Punishment: Lessons from South Africa," The British Journal of Criminology, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, vol. 64(1), pages 107-123.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:crimin:v:64:y:2024:i:1:p:107-123.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azad017
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:crimin:v:64:y:2024:i:1:p:107-123.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/bjc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.