Narrative & the politics of hope in the post-apartheid prison

Abstract

Discourses on penal reform and rehabilitation in post-apartheid South Africa have given rise to a widespread disavowal of the structural determinants of crime in the country. Rooted in moralising ideas of individual accountability, the ‘rehabilitative prison’ functions ideologically to warp collective understandings about criminality, and to foreclose more radical forms of intervention into the social and economic conditions that track vulnerable people into prison. In this thesis, using the historical constitution of penal reform as a backdrop, I argue that cycles of complicity exist not only in political and mass-mediated spheres, but at the level of ‘the everyday’ as well. Tracing the narrative biographies of two inmates from prisons in Johannesburg, I make the case for penetrating more critically the stories that people tell about their redemption in prison. The tendency by many inmates and ex-convicts to absorb and enact the redemptive script, I argue, is the product of a profound misrecognition of structural forms of violence, and plays into the persistence of these denials in a broader sense. I show that inhabiting the role of the ‘reformed prisoner’ establishes inclusion and produces hope, but that it ultimately obstructs more radical forms of resistance. In this way, the prisoners’ attachments to ‘betterment’ narratives can be read as state processes in miniature: on every level, investing in a historicising conceptions of individual improvement reflects the perceived impossibility of overcoming wider, more structural forms of violence that impede post-apartheid South Africa’s dream of democracy. I conclude by sketching an exceptional moment of ‘narrative intervention’ in which the state’s script becomes disrupted, and consider the way that hope, rooted in radical critique and action, might be reclaimed in a project of prison abolition in South Africa