Most South Africans have little desire to see the inside of a prison, but for habitual criminals, judicial confinement is a way of life, with its own insider routines, rules, culture and language.
Prisons have been with us for thousands of years, long before the rise of complex civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
They were not originally intended as places of correction but were used to detain wrongdoers until physical punishment could be administered in public. This generally involved flogging, mutilation or death. Prisons were also used as holding cells for galley slaves, gladiators and debtors.
Most early prisons were built underground for security reasons. Narrow stairways and dark passages led to claustrophobic cells and dungeons which were often dank and filthy. Prisoners were chained to the walls or to wooden blocks. Some languished miserably for years, waiting for a decision or a reprieve that never came.
The policy Jan van Riebeeck introduced to the Cape was based on Dutch judicial practice. However, culprits who survived their punishment were usually allowed to resume their former occupations, although slaves were sometimes hampered by leg irons.
The commander had nowhere to detain prisoners before the erection of the four-bastion
fort, a ramshackle mud-walled building which was later replaced by the Castle. The latter was well supplied with dungeons which served as prisons until the building of the so-called Tronk, which faced the Grand Parade with its back
to the sea. The slave lodge, completed in 1679, also made provision for confinement.
There was always the alternative of banishment to the company’s sheep farm on Robben Island, which at one time or another housed fractious Khoikhoi, disobedient slaves, mutinous soldiers and Asian political exiles. Some were obliged to work for their sustenance by quarrying stone or collecting shells for lime burning.
There was little uniformity in the VOC justice system at the Cape, which was often disorganised and routinely imposed light sentences on white offenders, while heavily penalising culprits of colour.
By 1800, during the first British occupation, some of the crueller punishments were replaced by fixed periods of imprisonment “proportionate to the heinousness of the offence”. This resulted in the expansion of the prison on Robben Island, which was expected to house increasing numbers of convicts serving long sentences. It also meant the disappearance of miscreants from a society that had little interest in their welfare.
In 1822, the British smugly congratulated themselves on an enlarged and commodious Tronk, clean and well supplied with water, where a medical attendant was on duty daily and an imam consoled Muslims. Too good to be true?
We shall see next week.
* Jackie Loos' "The Way We Were" column is published in the Cape Argus every week.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.