Carceral abolition as a South African possibility: A feminist perspective on the failure of policing and the criminal justice system in South Africa

abstract

The case for the abolition of the police and prisons has become urgent as the world considers how prisons do not encourage rehabilitation and justice but rather operate as sites of structural violence. Although activists such as Angela Davis have been highlighting the violence of the carceral system and the weaponisation of the system to facilitate the oppression of Black people since the anti-racist movements of the 1960s, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests heightened discourse about the carceral system and policing. This article seeks to identify the role that Black feminist traditions play in the imagination of alternatives to policing and incarceration as punitive solutions to crime. Additionally, it seeks to illustrate the failures of policing in South Africa and whether transnational feminist solidarities can offer interventions to crime that are not rooted in the carceral system.

In laying out the case for the abolition of prisons and policing in South Africa, the article highlights the origins of policing founded on conquest and colonisation as well as masculinity and heteronormativity. It will also unpack how feminism across the Atlantic can weave and borrow strategies and interventions based on the context of location. Through the lens of transnational feminism, this article will illustrate the possibility of a transnational movement building towards a world that no longer relies on policing and prisons to repair communities.

keywords:

• abolition feminism
• carceral feminism
• intersectionality
• transnational feminism
• policing
• prisons
• queer
• sex work

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lethabo Mailula

LETHABO MAILULA is a Black queer scholar at the University of the Witswatersrand whose research focus is queer epistemologies, critical legal studies and critical race theory. She utilises a radical feminist and intersectional lens in legal pedagogy. Mailula is a cultural production critic and borrows the term ‘oppositional’ scholar from bell hooks to describe her pedagogical practice. With a history as a communication and advocacy strategist in civil society, Mailula attempts to merge theory and practice as a SOGIE activist. Email: [email protected]