Justice Gained? Crime and Crime Control in South Africa

• Published date: 24 May 2019
• Date: 24 May 2019

Justice Gained? Crime and Crime

Control in South Africa

Edited by Bill Dixon and Elrena van der Spuy

UCT Press & Willan Publishing. 2004. 320 pp. Price R181,00

ISBN: 1-84392-053-0

BOYANE TSHEHLA

Institute for Security Studies

This book is a third publication in a series that started in 1985 when Dennis

Davis and Mana Slabbert edited

Crime and Power in South Africa: Critical

Studies in Criminology.

The second volume by Desiree Hansson and Dirk

van Zyl Smit was produced in 1990 with the title:

Towards Justice: Crime and

State Control in South Africa.

The title of Dixon and Van der Spuy's work,

therefore, fits neatly with the two previous volumes that it seeks to

complement. Given that this book comes 14 years after the second volume, it

sets itself a daunting task of covering a long period of time — not least

because this is also a time in which much has happened within the criminal

justice system and the field of criminology in South Africa. In the field of

safety and security, by way of example, there has been a major overhaul of

policy with the main documents being the National Crime Prevention

Strategy (NCPS, 1996) and the white paper on safety and security (1998). This

is aptly captured by Dixon in his chapter with the title: 'Cosmetic Crime

Prevention', where he traces policy developments in safety and security and

points out that there has been a shift in emphasis in the continuum between

crime prevention and crime combating. This chapter, more than any other of

the chapters in this book, illustrates the point that the editors and authors of

this book have had to cramp in many developments into the book. Ideally,

there should have been another book around 1996/1997 to capture 'South

Africa's transition' adequately.

All chapters in this book focus on South Africa's transition — some less

explicitly than others. Transition seems to be a notoriously fashionable

concept that tends to be overused with little effort taken to explain it. Dixon,

therefore, is to be commended for grappling with the concept, though a few

pages can hardly do the concept the justice it deserves. His introduction,

which sets the pace for the book and introduces the reader to the field of and

background to criminological work in South Africa, is a chapter worth

402

(2004) 17 SACJ 402

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