ABSTRACT
By reflecting on the reception of a book he wrote about prison gangs in South Africa, Jonny Steinberg explores why it is so hard to write about prisons in ways that do not exoticise them, but, on the contrary, show their centrality to our common world. The chapter argues that prison gang culture has had an integral place in modern South African history. The price of acknowledging this, however, is to scupper South Africa’s most sacred historical narrative, one of a movement towards freedom. The world of crime and punishment is thus removed from the mainstream of history, the stories emanating from prison relegated to the status of exotic side tales.
