South Africa’s stigma against ex-offenders fuels recidivism

Our country has a recidivism rate of about 90% compared to 6% to 8% for China, an authoritarian regime where mass executions of re-offenders is common

Ex-offenders labour under South Africa’s harsh stigmatising, marginalising and shaming culture. 

While all cultures manage deviance (such as the cross-cultural phenomenon of crime) through shame, not all do so through stigma. Australian criminologist John Braithwaite made the seminal distinction between integrative and stigmatising shaming cultures in his wonderful book Crime, Shame and Reintegration. 

In societies such as China, Japan and many African cultures everything possible is done to help former offenders reintegrate into society. Initiatives include providing housing, job opportunities and other measures to facilitate their reintegration. Examples of integrative African societies referred to include Mali, Kenya and even Nigeria. But, in countries such as South Africa and the United States, former offenders are rejected from mainstream culture and driven into the arms of sympathetic criminal subcultures. Predictably, this fuels crime and reoffending and precipitates public safety disasters. 

The evidence suggests that this unfortunate group of people (the untouchables of contemporary South African society) has been described respectively as “some of society’s most marginalised people” (Mechthild Nagel) and a “highly stigmatised population” (Nicole  Jones-Young and Gary Powell). Nagel is a scholar of Africanist philosophy while Jones-Young and Powell are researchers of corrections and incarceration.

That being said, it is also true that not all marginalised groups are equally disadvantaged. Erving Goffman, the well-known American scholar of stigma, observed in his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoilt Identity that divorced individuals in the United States are less stigmatised in mainstream society now than they were half a century ago. 

Research has borne out the hypothesis that stigma fuels crime (as opposed to integration being an effective management tool for crime control), as Braithwaite sensibly points out. Labelling provides the former offender with a perfect pretext to reject their rejectors and promotes hardening or cementing of a criminal career path. This is the reason Braithwaite refers to stigma as “counterproductive” and labelling as “criminogenic”. 

It’s not surprising that South Africa has a recidivism rate of about 90% (certainly one of the highest in the world), compared to 6% to 8% for China, an authoritarian regime where mass executions of re-offenders are common. Japan, by comparison, has a recidivism rate of 48%. The latter two are both integrative shaming cultures. Finland, a liberal democracy, has a stigmatising shaming culture similar to South Africa’s but with an admirable recidivism rate of 30%. 

This point does, however, raise the question of how a stigmatising shaming culture might foster a tendency of genocide towards the marginalised groups in society. For some time now, public health workers and criminologists have expressed concern that incarceration creates serious public health issues. 

In a write-up for the Prison Policy Initiative, Emily Widra argued as recently as 2021 that: “We already know that having a family member incarcerated can cause financial instability, reduce social support, and increase the burden on caregivers. Studies have also shown that women with incarcerated partners experience depression, hypertension (high blood pressure), and diabetes at higher rates than those with non-incarcerated partners, and children with incarcerated parents are at increased risk for mental health problems and substance use disorders, which have long-term impacts on health.

Burying medically vulnerable people in prisons has serious public health implications both inside and outside the prison walls. This observation is true for all stigmatising shaming cultures but is especially relevant in the context of post-colonial Africa and Asia where prisons were extensively used by their colonisers to subjugate and obliterate indigenous peoples.

Building on these insights, a new study, Exposure to Family Member Incarceration and Adult Well-being in the United States, highlights that the loved ones of incarcerated people have a reduced lifespan of at least 2.6 years compared with those who have never experienced incarceration (after adjusting for demographic characteristics such as race, gender, household income and age). What is scary about this statistic is that it applies to the life expectancy and overall well-being of the loved ones of only one incarcerated family member. 

According to the study, where more than one family member is incarcerated, the life expectancy of both the incarcerated person and his or her loved ones could be reduced by as much as 4.6 years on average (adjusted for demographic parameters). Similarly, it has been argued that the daily microaggressions inherent in racism (yet another form of stigma), may adversely affect one’s health.

In an age of mass incarceration, even in liberated post-colonial societies such as South Africa, unjustifiably fuelled by the American craze, consider the public health implications of roughly 160 000 (including remand prisoners) incarcerated at any one time. One should consider that each incarcerated person may have at least six or seven loved ones affected by their imprisonment and therefore it is crucial to recognise the huge effect on public health of incarceration as our dominant sentencing regime. Controversial legislation on minimum sentencing in South Africa has further exacerbated the situation, as Judge Edwin Cameron, the inspecting judge of prisons, pointed out in another context.  

The reason or reasons ex-offenders have been unable to improve their lot in a stigmatising, shaming culture has been explained as follows, by US criminologist Ben Geiger. “Ex-offenders are not just marginalised, they are also a clear example of repeat losers in pluralist politics. Ex-offenders are often legally disenfranchised. In addition, legislatures impose collateral consequences of conviction on ex-offenders. Collateral consequences are statutes and regulations that inhibit ex-offenders’ productive re-entry into society. These statutes testify to ex-offenders’ lack of political organisation. Furthermore, both ex-offenders’ legal disenfranchisement and their de facto political powerlessness are systemic problems.

Consider these observations against the background that many community-based, non-custodial African sentencing options (such as community service) exist in African cultures that would be adequate for most crimes in South Africa. 

To conclude, I can do no better than use the heart-wrenching words of Widra: “Far from keeping people safe, prisons and jails are public health disasters, and closing them is imperative to public health. And if we must punish, let us at least do so sensibly.”

Dr Casper Lӧtter is a conflict criminologist affiliated with North-West University’s School of Philosophy.