Justice Gained?

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.