Wow! eBook
Justice Gained?: Crime and Crime Control in South Africa's Transition
Author(s): Bill Dixon (Editor), Elrena van der Spuy
- Publisher: Willan Publishing
- Publication Date: 1 Jun. 2004
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 274 pages
- ISBN-10: 1843920530
- ISBN-13: 9781843920533
Book Description
This title takes a critical look at the impact of South Africa’s transition to democracy on crime, providing a critical commentary on key issues in contemporary South African criminology. At the same time it provides a significant contribution to the wider debate about crime and criminology in societies in transition in other parts of the world. The book is concerned throughout with the nature, extent and speed of South Africa’s transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, from siege to market economy and from a patriarchal and discriminatory social structure to one founded on principles of gender and race equality. Each chapter sets the issue it addresses in its theoretical context and in the context of both South African and international literature on the topic, and then provides a critical assessment of the impact of the political, social and economic changes of the last decade as a means of understanding how crime, justice and the processes of transition have impacted on each other. Overall, this book forms an indispensable guide to the key debates in contemporary criminology in the South African context, challenging some of the received wisdoms (re)emerging in a discipline in danger both of forgetting its own history and misunderstanding the role of critical social science in a democratic South Africa.
