Session 2: Violent Punishment

8th Global Conference

Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Logics of Brutality: Gender and Violence in South African Men’s Prisons
Sasha Gear
Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg, South Africa

This paper explores the nature and circumstances of sexual violence happening in South African men’s prisons. Based on qualitative and quantitative primary research conducted at the CSVR it shows the highly gendered nature of this violence – how inmate culture imposes on certain prisoners a feminised identity which is seen, amongst other things, as legitimising ongoing sexual violation of those viewed as “women”. Particular notions of masculinity are thoroughly implicated in this and not only make this form of violence a logical exercise in manhood but also frame intense and particular challenges to victims. The upshot is that victims go unrecognized or receive only stigmatized and humiliating attention while perpetrators go unchallenged or are even valorized. The paper shows that, to varying degrees, the systems and practices of both prison gangs and the Department of Correctional Services support these sets of relations. Moreover, however, they have their roots in ideas about gender that have a firm grip in broader society as well. And while in the context of extremely highly levels of criminal violence facing South Africa, prisoners become the most visible ‘face’ of this violence, drawing angry and dismissive public attention, the paper highlights the urgency of engagement with prison violence. Not least, this is because intensely destructive ideas of what it means to be a man are endorsed and generated in prison. These are fed to the outside when inmates are released. Sexual violence taking place behind bars is thoroughly connected to wider patterns of sexual and gendered violence both in its roots and in its persistence, and this makes tackling prison violence a crucial component in the struggle to end violence happening between men and women on the outside.

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The Abolition of Capital Punishment: A Developmental Perspective
Ron Stansfield
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Capital punishment continues to be practiced by many countries despite its questionable morality and a long standing campaign by Amnesty International to abolish it. This article uses Kohlberg’s model of ‘moral reasoning’ to analyse the worldwide abolition of capital punishment. According to Kohlberg, certain experiences such as a close association (i.e., contamination) with a person or group with a higher level of moral reasoning or the experience of a traumatic event (i.e., catastrophe) can lead to the development of a higher level of moral reasoning. A salient feature of Stage 5 of Kohlberg’s model is the belief that the right to life is sacrosanct and therefore, capital punishment cannot be justified. For this study, countries were categorized as either abolitionist or non-abolitionist. The abolitionist countries were then classified according to whether they shared a contiguous border with an abolitionist country at the time of abolition and/or experienced a catastrophe such as genocide prior to abolition. It was hypothesized that a country has an increased likelihood of abolishing capital punishment if it was subject to contamination or catastrophe prior to abolition. This line of inquiry has important implications for our understanding of abolitionist campaigns of capital punishment and other forms of state initiated violence, such as torture, slavery, handguns, and landmines