Int J Polit Cult Soc (2009) 22:401–418

DOI 10.1007/s10767-009-9074-8

Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned

and Not Learned, from 1989 to 2009

Fran Buntman

Published online: 28 July 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract Dostoevsky, Mandela, and others have long noted that prisons expose social
realities, often hidden, particularly inequality and gaps between policy and practice. Prisons
symbolize, mirror, and shape the communities and countries in which they exist. Although
prisons informed and were intertwined with many of the defining moments of 1989, in the
20 years since, societies often failed to recognize the important role prison and punishment
play in relationship to democracy. By not recognizing that “prison matters” in relationship
to democracy, polities (whether in transition to democracy or established democracies)
failed to adequately learn “prison lessons.” Starting with a case study of South Africa, this
paper considers prisons during apartheid and under democratic governance. This case is
connected to other comparative and international examples (including Russia, Brazil, and
the USA) to identify five lessons learned and not learned concerning prison and democracy.
First, policies and practices of imprisonment reflect social orders, especially structures of
inequality and understandings of legitimate power and opposition. Second, countries
transitioning to democracy seldom anticipate rising crime and invariably neglect the
relevance of prisons. Third, nations do not adequately grapple with the role of prison in the
past, especially the nondemocratic past. Fourth, in established and recent democracies,
penal populism resulted as politicians defined prison as a solution to a host of social ills,
ignoring the consequences of expanded punishment. Fifth, prisons shaped key substantive
realities beyond their walls, from leadership to recidivism, scandals, fiscal deficits, and
crises of legitimacy.

Keywords Prison . Democracy . Transition . Inequality . Penal populism .

Policy–practice gap

The author thanks Elzbieta Matynia for the opportunity to work together, Victoria Bernhardt and Adam Dale
for research assistance, and an anonymous reviewer, Victoria Bernhardt, Barbara Buntman, and Manuel
Orozco for their helpful comments. This article will always be bound up with the memory of my beloved
father, John Buntman, who died soon after this article originated in his presence beneath a Cape Town sunset,
at a time when his absence was unimaginable and entirely unforeseen.
F. Buntman (*)
Department of Sociology, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
402 Buntman

South Africa’s Constitutional Court, a monument to the rule of law with expansive rights
for all, including prisoners, was built in the precincts of a once notorious Johannesburg jail,
known as the Fort (Constitutional Hill Foundation 2006). In its self-conscious architecture
and design, the Court’s modern and open buildings include architectural elements of the old
jail, highlighting the gap between past and present. Across a courtyard, another part of the
old prison, known as Number Four, is retained as a museum.1 Signal phrases from the new
Bill of Rights are displayed amid the dark cells and cold concrete to distinguish the
oppressive and grim past from the present-day constitutional rights. Furthermore, Nelson
Mandela’s words are reproduced to remind jurists, citizens, and tourists alike that “[N]o one
truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by
how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones—and South Africa treated its
imprisoned African citizens like animals” (Mandela 1994, pp. 174–175). Apparently
heeding Mandela’s insight, the democratic South African Constitution, adopted in 1996,
requires that prisoners’ “human dignity” is respected (Constitution, Chapter 2: The Bill of
Rights, S. 35, no. 2).
While the Constitutional Court precinct embodies the leap from treating inmates like
“animals” to according them “human dignity,” democratic South Africa’s actual prison
practices are far more complicated and messy. Numerous reasons explain the gap between
the stated rights and their frequent absence but certainly include not learning “prison
lessons” of the past. Moreover, South Africa is the rule rather than the exception in not
taking sufficient heed of the fact that prisons matter. Rather than being insulated
institutions, prisons reflect upon and shape societies. Looking back to 1989, it is striking
to consider how important prison was and is, and yet how many glaring prison lessons have
not been learned. Prison and punishment are implicated in many of the defining moments of
1989: the “fall” of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese government massacre in Tiananmen Square,
the release of most of the African National Congress’s (ANC) imprisoned senior leadership,
and the declaration of a new “War on Drugs” by President George H. W. Bush (the first
President Bush).
Practices of punishment and confinement exist in complex relationships to and with
democracy. In denying liberty, prisons exist in antithesis to the freedom which undergirds
democracy and democratic citizenship. However, penal sanctions also represent an
important means to maintain and advance democracy as majorities protect themselves
from criminal threats which undermine security and break the law. The connection between
democracy and incarceration is even more complicated in regimes that are authoritarian,
undemocratic, repressive, or illegitimate.2 Dictators or autocrats invariably expand
imprisonment and punishment, often in the name of democracy but to subvert liberty.
Because of the centrality of incarceration in nondemocracies, prison—from leadership to
culture—frequently has a disproportionate impact on the postauthoritarian state and society.
But democracies are not immune to carceral consequences. Prison and punishment function

1
Unlike the usage in the USA where “prison” and “jail” refer to distinct entities, I have used the terms as
equivalent in this paper.
2
The nuanced and complex debates and definitions about the precise meanings and array of democracies and
nondemocratic or antidemocratic regimes are beyond the scope of this paper. Democracy in this paper refers
to governments based on the right of all adult citizens (with very limited exceptions, at most) to choose
political representatives in free and fair electoral, partisan, and political challenges, with media freedom,
freedom of association, individual rights, and the rule of law protected. In contrast, nondemocracies
encompass a range of forms of state control with limited or no rights for significant groups or all of the
citizenry.
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 403

as social mirrors and metaphors but also as much more; they involve policies and practices
at the heart of public expenditure, penal law, electoral politics, and beyond.
Starting with a case study of South Africa, this paper argues that, looking back to the
20 years between 1989 and 2009, there are vital lessons to be learned concerning the
relationship between democracy and prisons. Some of these lessons should have been
apparent in and around 1989, and others should have been learned in the years since. Both
established and new democracies have, however, largely failed to recognize or heed many
of these lessons.
This paper considers the relationship of prisons to South Africa, during and after
apartheid, and then connects this case to other comparative and international examples to
point to at least five sets of lessons concerning prison and democracy. First, policies and
practices of imprisonment in societies are telling, if inevitably incomplete, reflections or
barometers of societies, especially in terms of structures of inequality and understandings of
legitimate power and legitimate opposition. Second, although prisons are important to
maintaining nondemocracies, countries transitioning from authoritarian rule to democracy
tend to neglect the relevance and consequences of prisons and punishment. Third,
transitions to democracy raise questions about how to deal with the past, including previous
policies and practices of imprisonment. Although countries deal with their undemocratic
pasts differently—from denial to truth commissions to secession to prosecutions—prisons
are seldom grappled with appropriately. Fourth, in both democratizing and long-democratic
countries, penal populism emerged as a new (and purportedly democratic) discourse and set
of policies. Politicians and publics identify prison as a solution to a host of social ills,
ignoring immediate and long-term consequences of these policies. Fifth, then, prisons shape
key substantive realities outside their walls, molding leaders, marking ex-inmates,
increasing fiscal deficits, and prompting crises of legitimacy.3

South Africa and Prisons: A Case Study

Prisons and punishment in South Africa illuminates that country while being instructive for
other contexts. The interaction of apartheid and penality is discussed before identifying two
postapartheid responses to prisons. On the one hand, South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) variously did, and did not, respond to the past use
and abuse of prisons. On the other hand, remaking the Department of Correctional Services
(DCS) and its work has been a fraught exercise for the nascent democracy.
Even before apartheid’s introduction in 1948, South Africa used imprisonment to
facilitate white and capitalist domination. For instance, pass laws regulated the rights of
Africans to live and work in specific areas, and the post-Union 1911 Prisons and
Reformatories Act codified racial segregation in prisons (Africa Watch 1994, pp. ix–x).
Apartheid expanded the use of prisons by criminalizing certain ordinary conduct, especially
urbanization (the pass laws) and political dissent. Apartheid’s opponents were subject to
detention or political imprisonment. From the 1960s, increasing numbers of detainees
(untried) and political prisoners (tried and convicted) were incarcerated (Albertyn 1991,
Karis and Gerhart 1997). The carceral infrastructure was central; in Barbara Harlow’s
(1996, p. 30) words, the apartheid “system was consummately summed up in its prison
apparatus.”

3
Emblematic rather than comprehensive literatures are used and cited in this paper, given the wide-ranging
nature of the sources and cases.
404 Buntman

In complicated and often contradictory ways, expanded political incarceration occurred

more or less simultaneously with new legislation and policy concerning imprisonment in
general. The 1959 Prisons Act included both progressive and reactionary innovations. It
introduced notions of reform, rehabilitation, and compliance with international norms,
specifically the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. It also entrenched
and advanced racial discrimination, further militarized prison staffing, and banned
independent media coverage, all of which had drastic consequences for prisoners,
especially black inmates (see Van Zyl Smit 1992; Buntman 2003; Singh 2005).
Prison enabled white rule, but both “political” and “criminal” prison inmates used prison
to oppose white rule. Political prisoners constructed modes of social organization and
political control, and prison gangs also established their own self-governing zones of
authority and control (Steinberg 2005; Pinnock 1997). Gang organizations partly enhanced
regime control through divide and rule strategies, but it also meant the state ceded social,
economic, and other forms of power to criminal elements. In contrast, the apartheid regime
was often ignorant about the extent of political prison organizing. The most significant
prison in this regard was Robben Island (Buntman 2003). It most infamously held Nelson
Mandela until his move to a mainland prison in 1982. But an exclusive focus on Mandela
misses the point: antiapartheid activists and organizations used prison to train, recruit,
sustain morale, cultivate leadership, and educate their members with important consequen-
ces for the nature and strength of apartheid’s opponents in South Africa and beyond.
Moreover, the facts and conditions of incarceration were focal points of opposition to the
apartheid regime within the country and, importantly, internationally.
The apartheid past was the key concern of the TRC which was charged with
investigating gross violations of human rights committed between March 1, 1960 and
May 10, 1994. Established in 1995 under the National Unity and Reconciliation Act, the
TRC’s focus was “gross violations” of human rights, defined as “killing, abduction, torture
or severe ill-treatment of any person” (as well as facilitating or covering up such
violations).4 In addition, the legislation mandated the TRC to enquire into systematic
patterns of abuse.
The TRC convened a specific hearing on prisons in July 1997 (TRC 1997).
Significantly, this hearing was held in Johannesburg’s old Fort prison before it was
redeveloped to house the Constitutional Court. Some of those who gave testimony had even
once been inmates at the Fort. For 2 days, the commission heard about a range of carceral
experiences mostly concerning apartheid’s overtly political victims. These special hearings
or prisons highlighted incarceration under apartheid, issues which were largely absent from
other aspects of the TRC’s work. Prison as a site and imprisonment and detention as
methods of human rights abuses were largely dwarfed by the awful crimes about which the
TRC received testimony, including murder and kidnapping. One exception was consider-
able victim testimony to the TRC about torture in police cells (although proportionally few
torture victims actually testified). Importantly, however, the TRC heard far more from the
tortured than the torturers. Although torturers were offered amnesty from prosecution for their
confession, most torturers correctly calculated the new state would not charge them. Jeffrey
Benzien was one of the few who “came forward to talk about his job as torturer.” Journalist
Suzanne Daley surmised his “only distinction” may have been his openness because he was
“the only member of his unit to have” confessed (Daley 1997, p. 1).

4
Perpetrators of gross violations of human rights, whether proapartheid state forces or liberation movements
and antiapartheid groups, were entitled to request amnesty from prosecution—almost always granted—
provided they proved a political motive and fully disclosed their abuse.
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 405

The relative sidelining of apartheid’s prisons largely reflected the TRC’s legal mandate.
The controlling legislation for the TRC’s work (in general and not only concerning prisons)
put “ordinary” human rights abuses beyond its focus, especially if these practices occurred
according to law. In other words, the TRC dealt with abuses of law and not the ways the
laws violated people. Apartheid profoundly shaped, limited, dominated, and interfered in
virtually every aspect of black South African life. Such controlling functions, perhaps
expressed most ubiquitously in pass laws and their effects, are human rights abuses,
arguably even gross human rights abuses. But the abusive impact of pass laws, including
forced labor or imprisonment as punishment for violating these laws, were not in the TRC’s
mission.5
Perhaps no one moment symbolized the beginning of the end of apartheid more than
Nelson Mandela leaving Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990. But, while Mandela
may have left prison, crime and imprisonment came to be dominant features of the South
African polity. Crime, often gratuitously violent, competes with poverty, unemployment,
and HIV/AIDS as dominant (and often interconnected) social problems that threaten South
African security, stability, and prosperity.
While crime predated 1994, it emerged as a more serious problem under democracy.
Apartheid’s end brought an increase in the sheer quantity of crime along with a rise in
violence. Racist rule had given whites relatively greater protection from crime which was
diminished with democracy. Furthermore, crime had often been hidden previously, whether
by social norms or police indifference. Moreover, the Cold War’s end, the acceleration of
globalization, and South Africa’s reintegration in the world combined with domestic shifts
to provide new opportunities for organized crime to establish itself or expand its reach in
South Africa (see, for example, Shaw 2002; Gordon 2006; Singh 2008).
Ubiquitous criminal violence and increased levels of lawlessness led to significant public
support for imprisonment as a solution for crime. The ruling ANC was inconsistent vis-à-
vis crime, sometimes denying the extent of the problem, sometimes recognizing it and
framing it in socioeconomic context, and sometimes acknowledging crime and offering
populist and retributive solutions. The retributive discourse was at times fostered by some
within the DCS, including its commissioner (from 1996 to 1999), Khulekani Sitole, who
proposed building prisons underground in disused mine shafts. He and the then Minister of
Correctional Services, Dr. Sipo Mzimela, argued that many prisoners were no better than
animals and therefore such an environment was justified (SAPA 1997).
While Mzimela and Sitole were members of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) which was
included in the initial Government of National Unity, a retributive attitude was also found in
some ANC policy positions. In 1997, mandatory minimum sentences were introduced for a
range of crimes, decreasing judges’ discretion in sentencing. Parole options tightened under
the 1998 Correctional Services Act, although these only became operational from 2004.
“Time served” requirements increased before parole was allowed and courts had to provide
oversight over some parole decisions (Fagan, ND). For Hannes Fagan, the Inspecting Judge
of Prisons, these policy trends were rooted in a “vengeful attitude” that the solution to crime
“lay in harsh sentencing” (p. 7). The public embrace of tougher sentences to solve crime is
an example of penal populism, as discussed below. One consequence was “grossly
overcrowded prisons”; South Africa, argued Fagan, is “one of the worst countries in the
world, and the worst in Africa, in our use of incarceration” (p. 1). Longer sentences

5
Other institutions such as the Land Claims Court were intended to respond to specific abuses of apartheid
(and segregation before it, in the case of land appropriations). These mechanisms are beyond the scope of this
paper.
406 Buntman

increased overcrowding which worsened the conditions of incarceration, in everything from

basic human rights to prospects for rehabilitative programs.
In contrast, the Constitution emphasizes human rights, including prisoner rights. It
requires inmates, including sentenced prisoners, to have “conditions of detention that are
consistent with human dignity, including at least exercise and the provision, at state
expense, of adequate accommodation, nutrition, reading material and medical treatment”
(Constitution, Chapter 2: The Bill of Rights, S. 35, no. 2). This constitutional vision was
developed in legislation and other key policy documents such as White Papers and the
establishment of a Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons, created under the 1998 Correctional
Services Act (CSA; Muntingh 2006).
A consistent problem within the prisons, however, is the vast gap between principle and
policy on the one hand and practice on the other. South African prisons are typically
overcrowded and, all too often, violent, gang-ridden, corrupt, and lacking in basic health,
hygiene, care, or safety. One consequence of the problems appears to be death: “Natural
deaths among people incarcerated in South African prisons have increased by over 400% in
the 11 years since 1996” (Cronje 2009). Rehabilitation and reentry focuses are uneven, and
former inmates are especially burdened in achieving stability given the high levels of
national poverty and joblessness.
The 1998 CSA contained important elements to facilitate the Constitutional vision of
humane incarceration, but it was not implemented until 2004 (Sloth-Nielsen 2007, p. 389).
Little preparation appears to have taken place for the implementation of the Act... Given
the general conditions related to overcrowding, the lack of reintegrative services, the poor
physical accommodation…in many prisons, the numerous complaints about inadequate
health care, all areas in which the Act specifies prescribed norms and standards, it can be
concluded that the DCS is facing enormous challenges in working toward compliance
with its legislated mandate.... [The law’s] … contents and the import of the obligations it
contains appeared largely unknown, both at a grassroots level within the DCS and
externally (Sloth-Nielsen 2007, pp. 390–391).
Writing in 2007, Sloth-Nielsen argued that the DCS was by then focused on the future as
articulated by the 2005 White Paper on Corrections. This White Paper was well regarded
among those interested in bringing practice closer in line with policy and principle to create
more humane prisons that facilitate rehabilitation and reintegration.
The 2005 White Paper embodies many of the best international practices espoused in
various international instruments as well as those identified by academics, NGOs and
others; this relates especially to the correction and rehabilitation of offenders. The
challenge in the years ahead will be to operationalise this vision (Tapscott 2005a; see
also Tapscott 2005b, p. 37).
Challenges for the future remain enormous and lie both within and beyond the DCS. The
DCS decides the conditions and substance of confinement but overcrowding, for instance,
needs to be addressed by parliament, prosecutors, and judges who define crime and
determine sentences (Balfour 2008, DCS 2008, Van Zyl Smit 2005).
Overcrowding is worsened by 15 years’ worth of “dramatic increase[s]” (Sloth-Nielsen
2007, p. 385) in sentence length combined with using prisons to hold awaiting trial inmates
who cannot afford bail. Pretrial detention (and denial of bail) for risky suspects is a public
safety measure. In contrast, the imprisonment of those awaiting trial merely or primarily
because they cannot afford bail is indicative of how poverty shapes criminal justice
delivery; it also points to ways judicial or prosecutorial inefficiencies become problems for
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 407

prisons. (Furthermore, detention of indigent suspects and those accused leads to potentially
innocent people losing their liberty and state resources going to the high cost of
incarceration.) The “national average level of overcrowding of 45% or 51,428 prisoners”
(Yekiso 2008, p. 21) in turn exacerbates other problems, like the spread of HIV/AIDS and
tuberculosis in prison. In turn, those problems are related to others like inadequate medical
care, especially for people with HIV/AIDS, and denial about the prevalence of both
coercive and consensual sex (Dissel 2002; Sloth-Nielsen 2007).
Prisons in the postapartheid era share all too much in common with their apartheid
precursors, but there are also important signs of improvement and progress. One consistent
feature is that South African prisons are filled with people who are almost exclusively black
and overwhelmingly poor. Prisons tend to attract little public attention unless there is a story
of inmate escape, correctional authority corruption, or rare accounts of redemption. Prisons,
prisoners, and the work of corrections occasion insufficient interest and support from
government or civil society, despite the fact that recidivism is rampant. The failure to even
have “a reliable system for monitoring recidivism” underscores this neglect (Department of
Correctional Services 2005, pp. 71–72) and the challenges ahead. There are, however,
positive developments in correctional management at all levels. Chris Tapscott’s (2005a, b)
“best practices” study identified numerous such instances, with good management and
governance as common factors in the prisons that are running appropriately. Moreover,
raising the important question of oversight, the Civil Society Prison Reform Initiative’s
(CSPRI) commented positively in March 2009 on the recent developments that the
Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Corrections had “established a new standard in
Parliamentary oversight over the DCS” (CSPRI, March 2009, p. 3). This review function
forced the DCS to improve its own work and, importantly, increased public awareness of
prisons and corrections, including to embrace the role of civil society in a variety of roles.

Lessons for and Beyond South Africa

It is tempting to emphasize the unique nature of apartheid in general and South African
prisons in particular. In contrast, there are numerous lessons to be drawn from the South
African case study. These lessons apply to a range of countries and contexts and have
mostly not been learned in the wake of 1989. Noting similarities or resonances in
comparative work should not be misunderstood to suggest sameness or overstated or
thorough-going similarities, where these do not exist. There are glaring differences among
all cases, whether transitional democracies or stable (liberal) democracies. There are
profound differences between and among all societies and countries, as there are great
differences within national and social contexts. So there are always limits to comparability.
But, if only the unique identifiers of state are society are noted, there is little to be learned
by comparison and contrast. Indeed, what is perhaps shocking for many people is how
aspects of South Africa’s experience, especially under apartheid, do resonate, instruct, or
compare for other societies.6 Indeed, Mandela knew his reminder that prisons expose their
societies was not new: As Fyodor Dostoevsky noted in The House of the Dead, “the degree
of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

6
David Goldberg (2001) has made this point especially well with regard to apartheid’s Group Areas Act
resonating in urban development in the way many cities and countries dealt with marginalized groups, poor
and disproportionately of color.
408 Buntman

Lesson 1: Prisons, Poverty, and Power Are Awkward Facts in the Social Mirror

The racial or class distortions of prison and punishment are not unique to South Africa,
during or after apartheid. The disproportionate incarceration of racial, ethnic, religious, and
national minorities—invariably overlapping with structures of poverty and other forms of
disadvantage—is a worldwide phenomenon.
[According to 1995 government figures, o]ne percent of British men aged fifteen to
sixty-four was black.... Ten percent of British men in prison were black.... [I]n New
Zealand just over half of all the men sent to prison in 1995 were Maori and nearly
two-thirds of the women. Yet only twelve out of every hundred New Zealanders are
Maori. In Australia the disproportion is even more striking.... Native Canadians make
up 2 per cent of the population of Canada. Yet in federal prisons... 12 per cent of the
men prisoners and 15 per cent of the women are native Canadians.... In the state of
Rio in Brazil, 31 per cent of those in prison are white. The proportion of white people
in the population of Rio state is 61 per cent. In Eastern Europe the same pattern is
found with gypsies or Roma. It is estimated that in Hungary half of all the prisoners
are gypsies. They are about 5 per cent of the Hungarian population.... [I]n Western
Europe... the group affected is not indigenous minority citizens but foreigners. The
proportions of foreigners in prison are at least double and often treble or more times
the proportions in the country as a whole (Stern 1998, pp. 120–121).
Indeed, through race, class, ethnicity, and beyond, prisons tell societies a lot about
themselves. In her international survey of prisons, Vivienne Stern (1998, p. 114) reminds us
that “Most prisoners come from the poor, the minority groups, the uneducated, the
unemployed, the mentally ill. The prison is the magnifying mirror which reflects and
enlarges the unresolved social problems of the society which it serves,” (see also Reiman
2006). Prisons reproduce and sometimes exacerbate social problems. As Stern notes, “For
many prisoners prison is not unexpected. Their parents went there. Their brothers, friends,
maybe sisters go there. They are not surprised to find themselves there.” Indeed, research
consistently points to the fact that children with a parent in prison are much more likely to
commit crime themselves (see, for example, Roettger 2006, 2007; LaVigne et al. 2008;
Glaze and Maruschak 2009) Likewise, there are significant overlaps between victims and
perpetrators of crime, whether it is abused children who become violent adults or members
of poor communities who prey upon each other in zero-sum game quests for resources or
dignity (see, for example, Klevens et al. 2002). As Abbe Smith (2005, p. 368) notes,
“Although victims do not always become perpetrators... it is the rare serious perpetrator
who was not also a victim.”
In his theoretically and methodologically complex study, Organized Crime, Prison, and
Post-Soviet Societies, Anton Oleinik examines how the life-world of prison informs
everyday life “outside” in “normal” post-Soviet life. Oleinik (2003, p. 190) shows
“substantial congruence” between the “social structures... of the post-Soviet society and that
of the penal society.” A prison inmate explains that prison is “the same world but in
miniature,” whether criminal slang in Soviet speech (p. 4), the contemporary relevance of
blat, or the “thief-in-law.” Blat predated the Soviet era but thrived within it and involved
individual access to hard-to-attain resources. It “has its roots deep within the penal
subculture” (p. 196). Oleinik considers contemporary Russia a “small” society. The
“smallness” concerns arrested development and the comparison between the size of penal
society and society as a whole. A “small” society is putatively democratic but actually an
“undemocratic society in which modernization has not been completed” (p. 10) so social
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 409

organization becomes “local, non-institutional and informal” (p. 11). Oleinik therefore
argues that the Russian presidency reflects the logic of blat; politician and their core
supporters acquire power to advance their own ends, thus reproducing the criminal
subculture.
The logic and smallness of penal society are also evident in the “thief-in-law,” an inmate
leader whose job it was to “maintain order” based on the prisoners’ “illicit norms” (p. 71),
rather than the state’s rules. But the position of thieves-in-law migrated into the mainstream
society, including to provide oversight in the informal market (p. 202). In time, however,
their role grew.
There is a direct link between the penal and criminal worlds, on the one hand, and the
post-Soviet economy on the other. The penal subculture is disseminated first in the
criminal economy, then in the entire informal economy and finally in the post-Soviet
economy.... Moreover, the transformation of the thieves-in-law, who are ‘crowned’, as
players on the criminal market, is a rather recent phenomenon, unlike their organizing
function. (Oleinik 2003, p. 205)
There are political counterparts to the Soviet and Russian pattern of the penal influence
on society. Released inmates from apartheid’s Robben Island prison self-consciously
brought their political organizing back into South Africa. They took the substance and
structure of prison organizing into communities lacking power in order to enhance
resistance to the apartheid state (Buntman 2003). Irish Republicans similarly used their
prison struggles to stimulate political engagement on the “outside” (McEvoy 2001;
Feldman 1991), as have many other groups.
The prevalence of marginalized, despised, or minority racial, ethnic, and foreign groups
in prisons, the ubiquitous incarceration of the poor, and glimpsed exercises of power and
resistance in prison allow us insight and, often, greater honesty into often awkward or
embarrassing social facts. Prison truths are perhaps especially unsettling in democracies
because democracies emphasize fundamental equality as their foundational touchstone, but
prisons often display the obverse. It is not that most people in democracies’ prisons are not
guilty of their crimes; they usually are guilty (Reiman 2006). Rather, their guilt often
reflects social and structural realities about power and inequality as much (and sometimes
more than) as individual moral and legal failure. The first lesson largely not learned in the
past 20 years, then, is that prisons are much more likely to be mirrors of society, at least in
part, than aberrations at the margins. As Mandela reminded us: “No one truly knows a
nation until one has been inside its jails.”

Lesson 2: Transitional Democracies Were Mostly Blinkered to Prisons (and Crime), Even
when They Were Central to the Antidemocratic Past

Prisons (and related carceral regimes) often both symbolize nondemocratic rule and are
used to enable the functioning of authoritarian and other nondemocratic states. The Maze
stood for British occupation of Northern Ireland, Robben Island denoted apartheid
repression, and the gulag epitomized Soviet and especially Stalinist rule. This pattern was
(or is) true in Latin America, Africa, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Erin in Iran, in the extensive use
of labor and reeducation camps in China,7 and beyond. For some, whole societies or
regimes of rule are prison-like—Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and North

7
China employs both “reeducation through labor (laodong jiaoyang or laojiao)” camps and “reform though
labor (laodong gaizao or laogai)”. See, for example, Human Rights Watch 1998.
410 Buntman

Korea for all but the tiny elite. Commenting on Africa, for example, Peté (2008, p. 60)
notes that “the prisons of Africa were used by the colonial powers to control and subjugate
the indigenous populations. This social control function continued into the post-colonial
period, with political dictators making full use of the coercive traditions embodied within
these institutions.”
If carceral repression embodies authoritarian regimes for their opponents, regime
supporters believe that the status quo keeps disorder and rebellion in general and crime in
particular at bay. Both sentiments are often quite accurate because transitions to democracy
tend to increase crime and make previously hidden crime more visible. New governments
are, however, seldom prepared for the crime waves which engulf their nations. The
emerging democratic leadership came to power opposing the police, prisons, and
punishment of the old order and seldom thought through taking over the state’s repressive
functions. Precisely at a point where new governments anticipated decreasing investments
in prison or moving away from prisons as solutions to national problems, public outrage
and fear again situates prisons at the center of national discourse as a sought-after policy
tool (Shaw 2002; Karstedt and LaFree 2006).
Imprisoning more people for longer ignores extensive social policy research (some
examples are discussed in “Lesson 4: Recent Democratic Trends Have Promoted Penal
Populism as Apparent Solutions to Crime”, below) as well as the lessons of history, at
least as many former political prisoners would assert. Once incarcerated political activists
often concluded that prisons contributed to crime. Indeed, some went further to see penal
punishment as a cause of crime. Ex-political prisoners who sought to continue their
political activities in prison and upon release saw that criminal prisoners did exactly the
same thing with their criminal activities, sometimes cultivating more sophisticated
criminals. As former apartheid political prisoner Michael Dingake (1987, pp. 121–122)
argued:
The proponents of the prison system allege that prisons are for the rehabilitation of
social miscreants. Rubbish! They are seedbeds for social miscreants. Engines of
deviant behaviour. Prisons are a disgrace to society. Human society will never be
civilised until it rids itself of this scandalous institution in its present form. Never.
Prisons denature, dehumanise, depersonalise, decivilise and de-everything their
victims.... In South Africa, they are the same as everywhere and worse than
anywhere else.
Although the ANC was well acquainted with the prison apparatus the embryonic
democracy inherited, the IFP was given the Ministry of Corrections for the sake of unity.
Bridge building aside, the decision was odd given the ANC’s electoral platform, an
ambitious but thoughtful set of social welfare policies called the Reconstruction and
Development Program (RDP). Soon, however, the RDP was, variously, de-emphasized,
partially implemented, ignored, or rejected. It was partly displaced a few years into
democratic rule by the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Program (GEAR). GEAR
emphasized neoliberal economic policies and fiscal prudence over and above social
investment, reflecting a shift away from the ANC’s historic concern with ending poverty.
Another shift was the turn to prison and retribution as key solutions to crime. The
retributive turn was all the more ironic as state crime under apartheid went almost entirely
unpunished, whether because of TRC amnesties or, more often, a lack of evidence,
capacity, or will to prosecute. Apartheid criminals went free while the most deviant of the
violent society they spawned faced long prison terms when—and more often if—they were
ever caught.
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 411

The failure to adequately reckon with transitional crime and criminal justice in general,
and prison in particular, was the rule rather than the exception in transitional democracies.
Brazil provides a powerful and sobering illustration of the role of prison in exacerbating
crime, although the Brazilian state itself is part of the problem (Wacquant 2003; Holston
2009). James Holston (2009, p. 15) explains that important criminal gangs or comandos
originated during the early 1990s as gangs within the state prisons of Rio and São
Paulo. They initially formed in large measure to defend the rights of prisoners in the
horrifically abusive prison systems. This defense was central to their recruitment and
organization of members. Today, however, they command vast operations in drug
trafficking, extortion, and other criminal enterprises, both inside and outside prisons...
coordinated from within the prisons via an underground network of cellphones.
Ensconced as well in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the urban peripheries,
they dominate a certain amount of territory in major cities with a rule that distributes
summary execution along with diapers, milk, medication, and employment,
combining terror and public works. In this combination, they are not unlike the state
itself.
These comandos combine democratic rhetoric with their violent and autocratic “law.” This
law enhanced prison safety at the cost of absolute rule, violent control, and criminal
enterprise.
The Brazilian commando’s defense of prisoners is indicative of the growing emphasis on
human rights within prisons globally, despite exceptions, contradictions, and lacunae.
Despite the gap between principle and practice, an important development over the past
20 years has been the growing rhetorical commitment, and sometimes practical
implementation, of prisoner rights. The transition to democracy in Czechoslovakia saw
enormous improvements in the prisons between 1989 and 1991 (Human Rights Watch
1991), before the country split into the Czech and Slovak Republics. More broadly, Roy
Walmsley (1996) learned of significant improvements in the prison systems of Central and
Eastern Europe with democratic transition, although serious problems still existed. Both the
United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and the European
Prison Rules were vital to informing the improvements. However, as Joe Sim (2007, p. 193)
notes, “the unconditional support for human rights [of prisoners], which many
governmental and non-governmental agencies articulate,” must be compared to the reality
of “the brutal expediencies that govern everyday life in the majority of prisons around the
world.” Moreover, like Brazil, human rights discourses may lead to their own contra-
dictions. Karstedt (2006, p. 256) argues that the European Union’s imposition of human
rights regimes “on the vast and different landscape of the penal realm in Russia” is
“potentially counterproductive.” Nevertheless, the growing acceptance of prisoner rights is
notable.

Lesson 3: The Continuing Legacies of Imprisonment Are Insufficiently Acknowledged

or Responded to

Prison has lasting consequences, mostly negative, on former inmates, their families, and
communities. These impacts are seldom adequately recognized nor responded to. Former
political prisoners and detainees (as well as exiles) in South Africa were given some
compensation for the unjust hardships they suffered when the government passed the
Special Pensions Act in 1996 to provide modest financial support to many former activists
(Buntman 2003, pp. 290–291). These policies were, however, impeded by bureaucratic
412 Buntman

delays and an array of restrictive rules. Above all, these limited pensions could not repair
nor adequately constitute reparations for great toll of incarceration. The best known former
South African political prisoners achieved great success in politics, business, religious life,
and beyond, but they still carry the consequences of their past sacrifice. The continuing
costs are even greater for those who never fully recovered from incarceration or torture;
poverty, ill-health, and the destruction of families were common outcomes for those
persecuted for opposing apartheid, especially for those who were imprisoned and released
in the 1960s and 1970s.
The TRC’s special hearing on prisons made a modest and limited attempt to grapple with
the consequences of incarceration, especially for political activists. There has, however,
been little or no appreciation of the effects of incarceration on the thousands of ordinary
inmates, whether violent criminals or pass offenders. Those imprisoned for pass offenses
and other violations of apartheid law narrowly understood (that is, excluding either
commonly recognized criminal or political offenses) have received neither recognition nor
reparations. And South African criminal prisoners have had little in the way of
postincarceration reintegration.
The imperative to reintegrate ex-offenders, emphasized in the 2005 White Paper, is also
increasingly recognized in the USA as facilitating “reentry” of former inmates and gains
mainstream acceptance. The gap between principled recognition and policy practice
remains glaring. In 2008, the US Congress passed the Second Chance Act to support
prisoner reentry but it is woefully underfunded. At a local level in the US, recent political
shifts (such as treating rather than punishing drug offenders) and fiscal realities in the
context of the 2008–2009 economic crisis had varying consequences. Parole and early
releases were expanded in some jurisdictions to cut costs but often without meaningful
programs of reentry or reintegration. Nevertheless, expanded shifts to treatment and
community-based punishments improve on the retributive policies that dominated the US
over the past two decades.
Challenges to reintegrating former inmates are huge. Obstacles to successful reentry
overlap with influences on crime in the first place. These include poverty, lack of education,
criminogenic family or social environments, addiction and substance abuse, and distorted
family structures. Ex-prisoners often face both legal restrictions and unofficial barriers.
Many US jurisdictions prohibit ex-prisoners from various jobs, public housing, and the
right to vote, among other exclusions. Although uneven, these restrictions have led to
significant caste, class, or status groups of former prisoners who are denied various rights
and privileges of full citizenship despite the end of their criminal sanctions (Uggen et al.
2006). As Uggen et al. (2006, p. 283) note, this questionable “citizenship status and social
position” raises “important questions about the meaning and practice of democracy.”

Lesson 4: Recent Democratic Trends Have Promoted Penal Populism as Apparent

Solutions to Crime

A significant trend in the past 20 years was the rise of penal populism, namely mass public
support through electoral and partisan politics, stimulated by the mass media, for more
punitive punishment of criminals. As Robben Island, the gulag, Abu Ghraib, and Erin
symbolized the centrality of nondemocratic regimes’ reliance on prison, democracies have
their own symbols of penal populism. US examples range from the local (like Sheriff Joe
Arpaio of Maricopa County (Arizona) who has, among other strategies, used public
humiliation of inmates to show he is “tough on crime” or criminals) to state and federal
antidrug and “three strikes” sentencing policies that have led to vast increases in the number
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 413

of prisoners, including for nonviolent drug use (see, e.g., Elsner 2006; Mauer 2006; BOP
2009; Democracy Now! 2009; Zimring and Johnson 2006). In her seminal work on mass
imprisonment in the USA, Marie Gottschalk (2006) includes penal populism among the
reasons for the enormous growth in prison populations. She notes other important
explanations for expanded punishment, such as executive branch office holders’ vulnerability
to pressure as well as civil society or social movement politics, including those rooted in liberal
causes. Penal populism is, for most democracies, symbolized more by political rhetoric and
policies—such as being “tough on crime”—than by the spectacle of prisons themselves, which
are typically out of public sight. Furthermore, exposes of abusive treatment do impact public
discourse, from the abuses in Paris’s La Sante prison to the reality of US prison rape that led to
the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003 (Daley 2000; Just Detention International, ND).
While the USA is the leader in penal populism, it is hardly the only country embracing
prisons and punishments as solutions to crime or (re)defining social problems in terms of crime.
Roberts et al. (2003) examined penal populism in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New
Zealand. They found that, despite these countries’ differences, they had “create[d]
disproportionate punishments and [were] profligate with respect to the use of incarceration”
(p. 160). Loïc Wacquant (2003, p. 198) argued that various South American countries (Brazil,
Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru), having transitioned to democracy, were
“among the leading importers of US-style penal discourse and policies around the world.”
There is little evidence that long and punitive sentences usually achieve deterrence and their
proponents’ other anticrime goals—or claims (see, for example, Von Hirsch et al. 1999). Long
sentences do facilitate retribution and incapacitation, at least as long as the offender is in
custody. But the vast majority of sentences are not life sentences, as Jeremy Travis (2005)
captures in his book title But They All Come Back, a study of reentry. Rehabilitation requires
independent programming, and the longer a person is cut off from family, community, and
mainstream life, the less chance the rehabilitation is likely to be successful, especially if the
prison environment is criminogenic, which most are, as Dingake argued above. Punitive
punishment seldom enhances rehabilitation or (specific) deterrence, let alone reintegration,
restorative justice, or proportionately reduced rates of crime. It also ignores or aggravates
underlying social problems, including mental illness, poverty, and substance abuse.
[T]here is little evidence to support the assumption that animates penal populism—
namely, that increasing the severity of punishment will reduce crime rates. In other
words, we think that this trend in penal policy is irrational since it is inconsistent with
the results of criminological research.... The emphasis on imprisonment as the
primary criminal justice response to offending is, in our view, inappropriate and
outmoded (Roberts et al. 2003, p. 160).
Indeed, as many contend, penal populism and associated “tough-on-crime” policies are
symbolically rich but empirically flawed. They are, in Wacquant’s words, “counterproduc-
tive... ideally suited to dramatizing publicly their new-found commitment to slay the
monster of urban crime... because they readily fit the negative stereotypes of the poor”
(2003, p. 198, emphasis in the original). Rather than being tough on crime, these policies
involve the “penalization of poverty” in the USA and in other countries around the globe.

Lesson 5: Prisons Influence, Shape, and Distort Realities Beyond Their Walls, often
with Profound and Far-Reaching Implications

For all the differences between political and criminal prisoners and prisons, at least one
similarity is their impact and import beyond the walls. Key leaders of the post-1989 world
414 Buntman

were former prisoners, including Václav Havel, the first president of postcommunist
Czechoslovakia, Nelson Mandela, the first president of democratic South Africa, Irish
Republican Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, and Kim Dae-jung, South Korea’s
president between 1998 and 2003. Prison gave more than credentials; it shaped leaders and
organizations during confinement and inspired or symbolized their struggles beyond. South
Africa’s current president is and the first and third presidents were former Robben Islanders;
the second was the son of a former Islander). Ordinary prisoners convicted of criminal
offenses too often found prison a source of education or inspiration, from Malcolm X to
Charles Carlson, the American conservative who founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries,
to thousands of largely unknown ex-inmates around the world.
Not all the prison lessons or influences are admirable, whether for political or ordinary
prisoners. As James Finckenauer and Yuri Voronin (2001) explain, the Soviet prison system
gave birth to much of organized crime in the USSR and incubated its development over
decades.8 At a structural level, the impact of incarceration can hardly be overstated,
especially when significant numbers of a community’s members, usually men, go to prison.
Freudenberg (2001, p. 214) captures much of the US impact:
US incarceration policies and programs have a disproportionate impact on urban
communities, especially black and Latino ones. Health conditions that are
overrepresented in incarcerated populations include substance abuse, human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other infectious diseases, perpetration and
victimization by violence, mental illness, chronic disease, and reproductive health
problems. Correctional systems have direct and indirect effects on health. Indirectly,
they influence family structure, economic opportunities, political participation, and
normative community values on sex, drugs, and violence. Current correctional
policies also divert resources from other social needs.
Indeed, the US financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 is playing an important role in putting
the financial costs of incarceration into focus.
In contrast to relative public ignorance about mass incarceration, the US prison in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, established in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks,
and US abuse of inmates in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, reshaped the meaning of American
for many of the world’s citizens. Although President George W. Bush (the second Bush
president), used former Iraqi president, Sadaam Hussein’s, torturous prisons to vilify him,
the Bush administration repeated Hussein’s logic of prison terror, though thankfully not to
the same degree or extent. In country after country, from England to South Africa to China
to Israel and beyond, governments have learned that imprisoning opponents, especially if
they are not guilty, is a recipe for coalescing international (and sometimes national)
opposition. Abusing the inmates exacerbates the “public relations” problems. Such was and
is the case with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
In contrast to President Bush, early indications suggest that President Barack Obama has
learned significant lessons about prison from the previous 20 years. Obama’s politicization
owes much to the American antiapartheid movement which focused on Mandela (Obama
1995) and Obama visited Robben Island as a US senator. One of Obama’s first acts of
office, merely 2 days into his presidency and amid a grave financial crisis, was to announce
that Guantanamo Bay would close down. This act was heralded from South Korea to South

8
They further argue that prison-based criminal syndicates ultimately melded with the organized crime
structure that emerged from the Soviet government and Communist Party elite, with examples of cooperation
and conflict between these two factions.
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned 1989–2009 415

Africa. The Korea Times headline read “Guantanamo Shutdown to Polish US Image”
(February 4, 2009) while the Johannesburg Star’s oversize headline read “Obama Kills
Camp of Shame” (January 22, 2009).
Publics and elites increasingly question mass incarceration in sectors of the USA. While
most American criminal justice activity occurs at the state and local levels, some federal
developments are noteworthy. In 2007, the US Sentencing Commission reduced penalties
for crack cocaine offenses relative to powder cocaine and called on Congress to reform the
law further. The US Supreme Court restored significant aspects of judges’ discretion in
sentencing, significantly in a case involving the war on drugs, a key part of mass
incarceration. And Senator Jim Webb is seeking to put mass incarceration on the front
burner of American politics.

Conclusions

That prisons matter and must not be overused or misused have mostly been “lessons not
learned” in the two decades since 1989. Significant facts and processes in the years between
1989 and 2009 highlight the inherent relevance of penal sanctions to democracy. Key
leaders of the post-1989 world were former prisoners, and two iconic island prisons framed
these 20 years—South Africa’s Robben Island then and more recently the US prison in
Guantanamo Bay. While these two prisons evoke apartheid (and the Cold War) then and the
Global War on Terror now, dramatically escalated use of prison and other criminal sanctions
reshaped the American (political) landscape and also influenced “penal populism” in
Europe and elsewhere. Some, but not most or all, of the recourse to punishment was
informed by increased rates of crime; crime spikes were more important to informing
aspects of the embrace of punishment in countries transitioning to democracy. Political
actors championing democracy, or scholars of politics analyzing democratic (re)emergen-
ces, failed almost universally to recognize the extent to which transitions facilitated crime
and crime then occasioned punitive politics.
There are glimmers of hope as the two decades after 1989 come to a close. At least the
rhetoric of prisoners deserving human rights is increasingly ubiquitous, and there are
political and financial reasons to believe mass incarceration and penal populism are
beginning to be rethought. But South Africa epitomizes the gap between rhetoric and
reality, and its history and current reality remains a cautionary tale in the relationship
between democracy and prisons.

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