South Africa's stigma against ex-offenders fuels recidivism

• Published date: 26 April 2024
• Publication title: Mail & Guardian: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa)

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...