While everyone is excited about Thabo Bester and Nandipha Magudumana, the story may be much deeper than this action-packed movie. Personally, I am not interested in why the crime involving Bester, Magudumana and others occurred, but why it was exposed. The story behind the story could be much more than what meets the eye.
The Thabo Bester saga concerns something that no journalist wants to talk about, such as profits and corporate power in the South African prison industrial complex. This op-ed provides a background on the booming business of incarcerations as a possible trigger for the story that currently makes headlines.
It also concerns the globalisation of production and entrenched corporate power that stand to collapse many developing countries worldwide.
Tracy Chang and Douglas Thompkins argue that “the prison industrial complex comprises two major segments: prison privatisation and prison industrialisation”.
The majority of South African prisons are
