Criminal justice policy makers need to have an accurate appreciation of the impact of crime upon society. An important way of assessing impact is to establish the nature of public attitudes to punishment, sentencing and the criminal justice process. Criminal justice policy needs to be based on at least a degree of popular consensus and support. Where such consensus and support are lacking, it is essential to understand the reasons for this. The attitudes to punishment survey, undertaken by the Institute for Security Studies and the Institute for Human Rights and Criminal Justice Studies, seeks to provide this by analysing the views of Eastern Cape residents on punishment, sentencing and the criminal justice system.

The information contained in this monograph will assist policy makers and senior officials in the criminal justice system (especially the police and the judiciary) to make informed policy decisions based on the attitudes and perceptions of a wide cross-section of Eastern Cape residents. Many of the survey results are broken down by area of residence, as well as the gender and race of the respondents to assist policy makers in devising focused criminal justice policies and educational campaigns targeted at specific communities. 

The monograph is divided into a number of sections to permit easy reading and reference for those who are only interested in certain topics covered by the survey. The monograph’s executive summary provides an easy to read synopsis of the main findings of the survey. The key points section consists of a selection of interesting quantitative survey results.

Every monograph chapter is preceded by a brief chapter overview. Readers are encouraged to read the overview first to get a basic understanding of the contents of the ensuing chapter. Readers who merely want a basic understanding of the contents of a chapter — without too much detail on respondents’ answers broken down by area, gender and race — should read only the overview.

Chapters are interspersed with focus group findings. These provide additional qualitative information on the subject matter contained in the chapter. Readers will not miss out on any of the quantitative survey results by not reading the focus group findings. The survey canvassed the opinions of eleven focus groups. Sometimes the members of a focus group did not have anything to say on a certain issue, or they had nothing interesting to say which would add to the informative value of the monograph. In both cases, the comments of such a focus group were excluded from the monograph.

Most chapters contain a number of text boxes. These contain information relevant to the survey results discussed at that part of the monograph and should be of interest to readers who wish to be informed about the ‘bigger picture’ of the issue under discussion. The boxes, however, do not contain any information obtained from the survey. Readers only interested in the survey results may omit reading these text boxes.

Every chapter ends with a section entitled interpretation of findings. These sections contain no new information collected through the survey process (again, readers can ignore them if they are only interested in the quantitative data which emerged from the survey data). The interpretation of findings sections are devoted to analyses of the survey results and the implications of the survey for the criminal justice system and criminal justice policy makers.

Readers only interested in the survey results should only read the chapter overviews and the text in the chapters which is of interest to them, excluding the focus group findings, the text boxes, and the interpretation of findings. Where relevant, survey data that is difficult to understand, is also presented in graph or table form. Readers interested in the questions asked of survey respondents, should peruse the appendix at the end of the monograph which contains a copy of the survey questionnaire used by the fieldwork team.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This questionnaire-based survey was preceded by a focus group study conducted in June 1999. Participants of the eleven focus groups were chosen, based on their area of residence, race, profession or gender. The focus groups were comprised as follows:

Port Elizabeth (white community; black community; coloured and Asian communities);

Graaff-Reinet (farmers; black and coloured men; black and coloured women);

Grahamstown (black community; white community; coloured community);

Umtata; and

Thabankulu.

Focus group participants were asked to comment on, inter alia, their personal experience of crime; their perceptions of violent crime; the police’s ability to solve crime; the performance of the criminal justice system; judicial officers and lay assessors; sentencing policy; capital punishment; the prison service; vigilantism; and the rights of accused persons.

Many of the answers given by focus group participants were used to refine the interview schedule for the main part of the survey (see appendix). In total, 470 people over the age of 17 were interviewed.1 Once the field team had selected an area, fieldworkers randomly selected households in that area from which respondents were chosen on the basis of their age, gender and race. The fieldwork was conducted in August and September 1999.

Two hundred respondents were drawn from urban centres (Port Elizabeth, East London and Umtata); 210 from small towns (Butterworth, Graaff-Reinet, Grahamstown and Queenstown); and 60 from rural areas (Bizana, Peddie, and Tombo). Half of the respondents were male and half were female.

Almost half of the respondents were black (230), while the white and coloured group each consisted of 120 respondents. The three age groups 18-30, 31-50, and older than 50) each made up roughly one-third of the sample.

There were a number of reasons why the survey was done in the Eastern Cape only. Firstly, limited funding restricted the survey to one province. Secondly, the chosen province needed a mix of metropolitan areas, small towns and rural areas. Thirdly, the chosen province should have a wide spread of income levels ranging from high income earners to the very poor. Fourthly, parts of the chosen province should have been under the administration of one or more of the erstwhile homeland administrations. The Eastern Cape met all these requirements.

The Eastern Cape spreads across 169 000 square kilometres (13.9% of South Africa’s surface area). According to the 1996 census figures, it has a population of 6.3 million people, which represents a 15.5% share of the national population.2

In 1996, some 86.4% of the province’s population were black, 7.4% coloured, 5.2% white, and 0.3% Asian. The urbanisation level was 36.6% (53.7% for South Africa as a whole), while the unemployment rate was 48.5% (33.9% for the whole of the country).3 In 1996, 42% of the province’s residents lived in formal dwellings, 11% in informal dwellings, and 41% in traditional dwellings. In 1991, the Eastern Cape’s human development index was 0.507, while it was 0.677 for South Africa as a whole.4

The survey was made possible by the generous funding of the Open Society Foundation — South Africa, the European Union, and Technikon South Africa’s Institute for Human Rights and Criminal Justice Studies.

The fieldwork was undertaken by DRA-development. Mr Martin Sycholt trained and managed the fieldwork team, oversaw the collection and collation of the survey data, and wrote an extensive overview of the survey findings. He also cross-tabulated the data to a number of the questions in the interview schedule. Ms Lizette Meyer was responsible for setting up and conducting most of the focus group sessions, and she assisted in and gave technical advice on the design of the interview schedule.

Substantial assistance in the design of the interview schedule, and in the analysis and interpretation of the data was provided by two senior researchers from the Institute for Human Rights and Criminal Justice Studies: Dr Anthony Minnaar and Ms Duxita Mistry, and Ms Antoinette Louw, the head of the Crime Prevention and Policing Programme at the Institute for Security Studies.