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SENTENCED AND AWAITING TRAIL PRISONERS: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (Origins of…
SENTENCED AND AWAITING TRAIL PRISONERS: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Origins of prison rights
Prisoners did not have rights in South Africa till
1911
despite prisons emerging in
1803
Whittaker v Governor of Johannesburg Gaol 1911 WLD 139
Court ruled severe ill-treatment in custody awaiting trail was illegal
Prison rights dealt a major blow through the 1959 Prisons Act
An increase in the number of political prisoners
Goldberg v Minister of Prisons 1979 1 SA 14 (A)
Placed Commissioner of Prisons with the power to determine how sentenced prisoners should be treated
Defining the rights of prisoners
1980 saw the incarceration without trial of a number of people
Lead to attacks on the prison system and the state, both from within and outside South Africa
Courts did little to promote protection of the rights of detainees during the State of Emergency in 1988
Analysis of prison rights during Apartheid
Largely dominated by instrumental perspective of Law and Order
More fully determined by a supremacist policy of racial discrimination, oppression, segregation and institutionalised violence
Pain was the predominate instrument of punishment
History context
South Africa had the highest prison population per-capita in the world - 80% of incarcerated population was as a result of the pass laws
At the heart of gross human rights violations was the systematic dispossession, impoverishment and proletarianization of the African Population
Independent South Africa
Some argue that there was an exchange of state power and no social transformation
Calls were made to reform the Criminal Justice System
MArx (1856) argued that in the name of creating something new we reproduce the old. The ghosts of the past haunts us
Gramsci highlighted that during every transition morbid symptoms and monsters tend to appear