• Dr Casper Lötter: “Tenderpreneurs only care for their profits and have no regard for the crises in public safety that they have unleashed.”
• “It is imperative that all South Africans resist the revival of this American monster known as the Prison-Industrial-Complex on South African soil.”
• “In this struggle against crime, Groenewald deserves our full support.”
“The recent attack of tenderpreneurs on Pieter Groenewald, Minister of Correctional Services, brought a bitter taste to my mouth,” says Dr Casper Lötter, a conflict criminologist at North-West University (NWU). The episode, he argues, recalls “the contentious and unsavoury Bosasa tender-rigging, bribery and corruption scandal of the Zuma years.” In that scandal, as two chroniclers of Bosasa’s billions put it, “money was not being used by the Department for the programmes it was intended for.”
Lötter insists that the same pathology now resurfaces in the Department of Correctional Services. “I was perhaps one of the first scholars of incarceration (Angela Davis being the first) to explore this phenomenon on South African soil which goes by its American name as the Prison-Industrial-Complex (the PIC). The deals of these newly minted tenderpreneurs run into billions of rands and have rightly been questioned by Dr Groenewald.”
The criminologist cites Eric Schlosser’s definition of the PIC as “prison expansion without any actual need.” Why such absence of need? “In South Africa’s harsh stigmatizing shaming culture, the stigma which attaches to ex-offenders after their release from prison, and which prevents them from obtaining employment, establishing significant relationships and sustainably reintegrating, is ‘counter-productive and criminogenic’,” he notes, quoting John Braithwaite.
The cycle is merciless. “Michelle Alexander, the well-known US civil rights activist, explores this idea in the following terms: The disturbing phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison, trapped by their second-class status, has been described by Loïc Wacquant as a ‘closed circuit of perpetual marginality.’ Hundreds of thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy.”
For Lötter, this revolving door of crime is no accident. “The PIC impacts this aspect of recidivism in a profound way by facilitating and encouraging the revolving door of crime in the form of re-offending since this is a natural consequence of prison expansion where there is no real need for it. The prime motivation for the PIC is the generation of profit as envisaged by the tenderpreneurs calling for Groenewald’s dismissal, without any regard for the impact of the waves of crime unleashed by their ill-considered demands.”
He points to his own research published in 2020. “In my paper on the PIC’s presence in South Africa, published in the Unisa journal Phronimon, I argue that ‘[the presence of the PIC] was exposed in recent months by evidence at the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, which revealed alarming levels of corruption at the Department of Correctional Services, as well as fraudulent collusion with its corporate partners.’ These ‘services’ are, for the most part, rendered at vastly inflated prices which, of course, is the point of the exercise.”
Crime, he continues, is never monocausal. But “the presence of the Prison-Industrial-Complex as an effort to generate profits from other people’s misery by artificially stimulating prison expansion without any actual need, is one such initiative. Stigma is perhaps the most effective driver of reoffending in South Africa as it blocks ex-offenders from sustainable reintegration.”
The argument is bleak but insistent: “The high recidivism rate in South Africa can at least partially be explained by a PIC which inclines the Department of Correctional Services - within the context of a stigmatizing shaming culture based on incarceration as our dominant sentencing regime - to recycle prisoners for profit rather than to see them rehabilitated and reintegrated into society.”
Angela Davis once asked whether punishment may be “the consequence of other forces and not the inevitable consequence of the commission of crime.” Lötter echoes her. “The public money diverted from other projects and needlessly spent on prison expansion could be used for other worthy initiatives, such as education, road maintenance, health and housing, which would allow people to live better, more satisfying lives.”
Other sanctions should be considered: “Incarceration as our dominant sentencing regime has not made us any safer and other African-centric punishments (such as community service or other ideas in restorative justice) should be considered instead of incarceration by default.”
Michel Foucault once observed: “So successful as the prison has been that, after a century and a half of ‘failures,’ the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it.” For Lötter, that reluctance is compounded by profiteering. “Not only has the PIC distorted our understanding of crime, but it also encourages South Africa’s unsustainable re-offending rates (one of the highest in the world) with its revolving door and recycling initiatives.”
Nor should South Africans be deceived by rhetorical camouflage. “Let us not be swayed by the false cries of alleged frustration of BBEEE (Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment), since this is decidedly not a form of BBEEE, but, instead, surreptitious fraud and theft of the public purse by another name.”
The criminologist’s conclusion is unequivocal. “It is imperative that all South Africans resist the revival of this American monster known as the Prison-Industrial-Complex on South African soil, reminiscent of the Bosasa scandal perpetuated by Jacob Zuma and his cronies and represented in its new guise by the attack of tenderpreneurs on our Minister of Correctional Services. The PIC represents a most grave danger to public safety. These tenderpreneurs only care for their profits and have no regard for the crises in public safety they have unleashed on ordinary South Africans. In this struggle against crime (and I am referring to state capture in the form of the PIC in particular), Groenewald deserves our full support.”
Dr Casper Lötter
