Governing through Crime in South Africa: The Politics of Race and Class in Neoliberalizing Regimes. By Gail Super. Dorchester: Ashgate, 2013. 182 pp. $98.96, cloth.

• Date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12148
• Published date: 01 June 2015

contributions of this volume show once again, it is extremely dif-

ficult to overcome this contradiction. Exerted violence always cre-

ates damage to legitimacy at some point or the other. To rebuild

trust is then extremely expensive and takes a lot of time.

This volume is thus a very valuable contribution to the grow-

ing debate about the variety of police work on the globe, its con-

nections, its history, and its politics. A critical remark could be

made about the rather technical “police perspective”—the

authors are either very reflective practitioners who are critical of

the police or scholars who do not hide their sympathy for the

political projects that in each case was pursued by police forces.

The reader might miss a bit of a discussion on political alterna-

tives, especially in the form of social policy that usually accompa-

nies successful police work in a historical perspective. There is

probably no society in which there is total harmony with the

police. However, those cases where the police is fully accepted

seem to be those where crude social injustice is mediated by

social policies. Nonetheless, this is a remark aiming at further dis-

cussion, and it does not diminish the value of this extremely

informative volume.

***

Governing through Crime in South Africa: The Politics of Race and

Class in Neoliberalizing Regimes. By Gail Super. Dorchester:

Ashgate, 2013. 182 pp. $98.96, cloth.

Reviewed by Jonathan Klaaren, School of Law, University of the

Witwatersrand

In ways more similar than different, crime policies in South

Africa after the end of formal apartheid play out in a field where

the poor are not well represented and indeed where punitive

penal policies absurdly reinforce the inequality of the society. So

argues Gail Super in Governing through Crime in South Africa.

Super’s raw material in this well-researched book comes from her

focus on “official criminology”—state discourses about crime and

criminality (pp. 6–7). These discourses are a form of communica-

tion and are themselves performative. Using this material, Super

shows how the politics of race and class in post-apartheid South

Africa under the conditions of neo-liberalism have led to a place

where criminal justice and prisons policy appear to exhibit more

Book Reviews 551