Why Apartheid Planning Continues to Undermine Efforts at Crime Reduction
This article addresses the debate about how to deal with crime. It argues a balance is needed between a law enforcement approach and approaches that deal with the social risk factors for crime. It argues further that until urban spatial planning takes into consideration the need to undo the divisions of the past and so address the effects of inequality and difference, any attempts at dealing with crime will be significantly constrained.
Published on 09 March 2011 in ISS Today
Chandre Gould, Senior researcher, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Pretoria Office
There are no shortage of theories, hypotheses and even unfounded beliefs about what drives crime and what is the best approach to solving the problem. Approaches to the problem fall into two broad categories. One calls for the social risk factors for offending to be addressed. According to this approach the intervention required to address crime is essentially developmental in nature, focused on improving the ‘health’ of individuals, family and neighbourhood. The second approach focuses on improving external social control. This includes increasing the number of police, putting more people in prison, and applying longer and harsher sentences with the aim of deterring would be criminals and thereby reducing crime.
In the face of high levels of violent crime the popular view tends to be in favour of the harsher, retributive approach to crime. This is the approach that South Africa has favoured since 1994. There is a tremendous gulf between the two approaches and even within each of these are nuances and debates that rage about how and what to prioritise.
It is trite, but true, that the individual factors that contribute towards the motivation and justification to commit crime, as well as the circumstances that hinder or facilitate the commission of crime are enormously complex and individualised to each person and crime type. Both approaches to dealing with the problem of crime also have varying degrees of merit. The challenge is to find a middle path that addresses factors that facilitate criminal behaviour at both micro and macro levels.
Professors Keith Soothill (Emeritus Professor of Social Research) and Brian Francis (Professor of Social Statistics), both at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom have analysed huge datasets in order to unpack the contribution of a range of factors on the propensity of an individual to commit crime. They have also considered the various theories put forward by those seeking to explain why crime rates in the United States fell dramatically in the early 1990s (at the same time as crime rates fell in Canada and Europe). They reach the conclusion that “the pivotal issue is whether one can develop a society in which all persons feel that they have a stake and, thus, develop internal controls to resist crime. The development of more prisons and more intrusive policing is a sad measure of the failure to do this.”
If social capital is one of the factors which has to be part of any solution to the problem of crime then finding solutions to the problem in South Africa is going to be complicated, indeed bedevilled, by apartheid spatial planning and development, and the post-1994 perpetuation of the spatial separation on the basis of class.
Inequality is one of the social factors that has been identified as contributing to high rates of crime, especially homicide, both nationally and internationally; it is also a factor that reduces the development of social capital. Quite simply put, social capital is about shared interests and values. Michael O’Donovan, a South Africa researcher and independent consultant, has shown through a statistical analysis of income levels and crime rates that there is a “correlation between average precinct income and crime rates – with low income rates corresponding to low crimes rates (both violent and non-violent)”.
Taken further, the analysis shows that while inequality within an area does not contribute to crime levels, inequality between precincts does do so significantly. In other words, when people with different and even highly unequal levels of income live in the same place there is less likelihood of a high rate of violent and property crime, than if you have two communities situated close to one another with vastly different income levels. Throw in the fact that the differences between the two communities are likely to be differences of race or ethnicity as well as class and you have a situation in which building social capital - or shared interests - is close to impossible. There is no doubt that this kind of analysis is intuitive – it won’t come as a big surprise to either community that it is the differences between them that contribute to high levels of crime.
Yet, if this is one of the primary factors driving high levels of crime, then it should be brought to the attention of spatial development planners at provincial and local level. A recent local structure plan for the development of peri-urban areas in the Western Cape shows how entrenched the notion of separate development is. The plan refers to an area that has the classic characteristics of apartheid town planning: a small town or village where wealthy and middle class whites live, bordered by a township of mainly working class blacks and coloureds.
The plan makes several disturbing proposals; one being that people who have been living in two informal settlements that are seen to sully nearby neighbouring middle class developments be moved to the township outside the village (this is despite the fact that all three communities have previously rejected this idea). Furthermore, the plan treats the two communities (the middle class village and the working class township) as separate entities and emphasises different interests and needs. It plans for different business centres for each of the two communities; identifies different roles for the communities in terms of attracting and servicing tourism; and different transport nodes. The plan neglects shared interests and therefore fails to identify initiatives that could build social capital between the two communities. Yet, it is in precisely in these kinds of small towns that it would be much easier to redress the past through more sensitive, informed and creative planning, than it might be in urban centres.
It is deeply concerning that structure plans, such as this, will form the basis for future development and as such will work to reinforce the divisions of the past and bequeath these divisions to future generations. This does not create the basis for growing healthy, safe, equitable communities. Nor does it address the need to leave a legacy that breaks with the destructive social engineering of apartheid. The future of these communities should instead lie in integrated development, where rich, poor and middle classes will live in close proximity to one other and share services and amenities. Such an approach will contribute to building the social capital that is necessary not only to overcome prejudice and racism, but also crime.
