Parole and deportation: The South African crimmigration experience for foreign national offenders

Abstract

Parole in South Africa, formally framed as a mechanism of rehabilitation, functions for foreign nationals as an extension of immigration enforcement. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 26 parole board members in Gauteng Province and analysis of legal and policy texts, this article shows how non-citizens are excluded from correctional supervision, placed in higher security facilities, denied access to work programmes and often detained beyond their lawful release dates because of bureaucratic failures. On release, undocumented parolees are transferred to Lindela Repatriation Centre, where parole dissolves into immigration detention. Lindela is theorized as an anomic crimmigration zone, a space where legal categories collapse and rights protections evaporate. Within this zone, the article develops the concept of the peregrinum homo sacer to capture how foreign parolees lose both penal protections and migration rights and reduced to bare deportability. The analysis advances debates on bifurcated justice, adiaphorization and bordered penality by showing how parole becomes a site of crimmigration control. The article contributes empirically by documenting exclusionary practices within South Africa's parole system and theoretically by introducing the concepts of anomic crimmigration zone and peregrinum homo sacer to global scholarship on punishment, borders, and migration.

Keywords

adiaphorization anomic crimmigration zone bifurcated justice crimmigration deportation foreign national offenders Lindela Repatriation Centre parole South Africa

Introduction

Parole, typically framed as a rehabilitative tool, functions for non-citizens primarily as a route to deportation. South Africa's correctional system has historical roots in segregation and punitive governance (Dissel and Ellis, 2002), with these exclusionary logics continuing to shape the treatment of non-citizens incarcerated within the correctional centres. Of an estimated 166,000 inmates nationally, approximately 25,500 are foreign nationals (Mosia, 2025). For this group, parole does not signify supervised freedom, but rather a transition into a second phase of state control, culminating in deportation. South African media have repeatedly drawn attention to the differential treatment of foreign nationals at the parole stage. Headlines such as ‘Foreign nationals are being held in prison past their release dates’ (Postman, 2020) and ‘Foreigners languishing in SA prisons, despite overdue parole dates’ (Hlatshaneni, 2020) reported instances where non-citizens remained incarcerated well beyond the dates approved by parole boards. The Wits Justice Project similarly documented complaints from foreign inmates who claimed to have been unlawfully detained after parole eligibility (Wits Justice Project, 2020, November 9). These reports stand in stark contrast to the official position of government, which maintains that parole applies equally to all convicted offenders irrespective of nationality.

The Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998 provides the statutory basis for parole, envisioning it as a balance between punishment and rehabilitation. For foreign nationals, parole is however not governed by statute but by chapter 17 of the Department of Correctional Services Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are internal directives that guide parole practices but lack the force of statute. It is important to note at the outset that neither the Correctional Services Act nor the Constitution of South Africa creates a category of ‘citizenship laws’ governing parole. Both instruments are laws of general application, and South African courts have confirmed that the constitutional rights they enshrine, including rights to dignity, equality and rehabilitation, apply to all persons within the Republic regardless of nationality or immigration status. There are no statutory provisions that legitimately differentiate between citizens and non-citizens in terms of eligibility for parole or rehabilitation. The problem this article identifies is precisely the inverse of special treatment. Foreign nationals are not excluded from parole by law. The exclusion stems from internal administrative procedures that lack statutory force and have never been subjected to parliamentary scrutiny or judicial review. The article therefore argues that all persons who qualify for parole and rehabilitation under the law should receive it, and that the administrative practices currently substituting for law raise serious constitutional concerns about legality, equality and separation of powers. These SOPs require that, where parole is granted for a deportable foreigner, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) must place the individual on the ‘V-list’. The V-list is not a Correctional Services database but a DHA border-control mechanism (linked with the South African Police Services) that designates deported parolees as prohibited persons and prevents their lawful re-entry to South Africa. Correctional Case Management officials implement this requirement by ensuring deported parolees are handed over to DHA, who then initiate placement on the V-list. In this way, a Home Affairs immigration enforcement tool is directly incorporated into parole procedures, further denying access to community-based correctional supervision and mandating transfer to Lindela Repatriation Centre pending deportation.

Lindela Repatriation Centre is South Africa's primary immigration detention facility, located in Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg and administered by the Department of Home Affairs through a private contractor. It functions as a holding centre for foreign nationals awaiting deportation in terms of the Immigration Act 13 of 2002. While formally defined as an administrative detention facility and not a penal institution, Lindela operates within the broader architecture of South Africa's crimmigration system, where criminal justice and immigration enforcement intersect. As this article demonstrates, Lindela plays a central role in the postrelease governance of foreign national parolees, who are transferred directly from correctional facilities into immigration detention pending deportation. This bifurcated regime produces divergent outcomes: for citizens, parole offers conditional reintegration under supervision; for non-citizens, it operates as expulsion. The absence of statutory safeguards creates a legal vacuum, where administrative discretion prevails and accountability is minimal. Foreign national parolees are routinely denied correctional supervision, vocational programmes and rehabilitative opportunities; many are misclassified into higher-security facilities irrespective of offence severity; and others remain incarcerated beyond their lawful release dates due to bureaucratic delays in coordination between the Department of Correctional Services and the Department of Home Affairs (Amit, 2012; Louw and Luyt, 2009a).

Although this article focuses on South Africa, the neglect of deportation as a subject of scholarly inquiry is not unique to this context. As Neergaard et al. (2025) demonstrate in their study of Nordic countries, deportation has long been a ‘covered track’ within both national histories and migration studies. This article contributes to addressing that blind spot by focusing on deportation in the analysis of South Africa's parole system.

This article investigates these dynamics through qualitative interviews with members of Correctional Supervision and Parole Boards across Gauteng province in South Africa, alongside analysis of law, policy documents and internal SOPs. The interviews reveal how officials navigate these ambiguities, often perceiving deportation as a form of leniency since deported parolees are no longer monitored in South Africa. However, as the analysis demonstrates, such perceptions obscure the systemic exclusion that parole and deportation entail for non-citizens.

To analyze these dynamics, the article employs four conceptual lenses. Firstly, bifurcated justice (Turnbull and Hasselberg, 2019), that is, the existence of two parallel systems of justice, one rehabilitative for citizens and one expulsive for non-citizens. This captures how two distinct regimes of parole operate simultaneously, where one is statutory and rehabilitative for citizens, and the other administrative and expulsive for non-citizens. Secondly, adiaphorization (Bauman, 2016): this concept describes how certain groups’ suffering is treated as morally irrelevant or invisible, it, highlighting the moral disengagement that enables officials to treat foreign parolees as outside the ambit of obligations owed to ‘ordinary’ offenders. Thirdly, drawing on Agamben's (1998) figure of the homo sacer, the article develops the notion of the peregrinum homo sacer (Maravanyika, 2026): the homogenized and immigration-detained foreigner stripped of both penal rights and immigration protections, reduced to bare deportability. Fourthly, the article introduces the concept of the anomic crimmigration zone as an original theoretical contribution. Adapted from Durkheim's theory of anomie, where norms and rules lose their regulating force and ‘normlessness’ prevails, this concept captures the legal and institutional vacuum in which parole, detention and deportation intersect without statutory clarity. In such spaces, exemplified by Lindela, procedural protections guaranteed by the law collapse and migrants are governed through bureaucratic discretion.

Literature and conceptual framework

The fusion of criminal and immigration law, known as ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf, 2006), has generated a growing body of scholarship exploring how migration governance increasingly overlaps with penal control. Much of this work highlights how non-citizens are subjected to distinctive forms of punishment, often blurring the line between imprisonment and deportation. Aas (2014) conceptualizes this as bordered penality, where penal institutions become sites for enforcing political membership and exclusion.

Crimmigration research has further illuminated the lived consequences of this convergence. Ugelvik and Damsa (2018) develop the notion of the ‘pains of crimmigration imprisonment’, showing how migrants experience immigration detention that combines penal harms with the precarity of deportability. Bowling and Westenra (2018) describe this as adiaphorization (a process of moral disengagement through which migrants’ suffering is rendered irrelevant or invisible). For Bauman and Donskis (2015), this indifference reflects a broader ‘moral blindness’ that normalizes exclusion. Such insights are central to understanding why parole, which in principle offers reintegration, is in practice recast as a mechanism of expulsion for foreign nationals.

South African prison and parole literature

In South Africa, local scholarship has long critiqued the opacity, inconsistency and exclusionary character of the correctional system. Dissel and Ellis (2002) trace continuities from apartheid-era segregation into contemporary misclassification practices, while Dissel (2008) highlights how denial of rehabilitative opportunities undermines reintegration. Louw and Luyt (2009b), Mujuzi (2011), Wolf (2024) and more recently Louw and Sibanyoni (2026) point to tensions between judicial sentencing and correctional discretion in parole placement. Muntingh (2012) underscores the lack of transparency in Correctional Supervision and Parole Boards. Importantly, Louw and Luyt (2009a) provide one of the few analyses of parole decision making, noting the role of SOPs (internal Department of Correctional Services directives that guide parole practice but lack the force of statute) and the absence of clear statutory guidance. Alongside these SOPs, the Department of Correctional Services and Department of Home Affairs also employ administrative devices such as the ‘V-list’, a database maintained by Home Affairs/South African Police Services that designates deported parolees as prohibited persons and blocks their re-entry into South Africa even after their sentences lapse. Because the V-list is not grounded in statute but in administrative practice, it further illustrates how migration control infiltrates the parole system, expanding the discretionary and exclusionary logic of crimmigration. Together, this body of work demonstrates that parole is contested and uneven even for citizens; for foreign nationals, the obstacles are magnified.

Immigration enforcement and detention

Parallel South African research on immigration detention reinforces this picture of systemic exclusion. Amit (2010, 2012, 2013) documents widespread rights violations, unlawful detention, and the disregard of court orders by the Department of Home Affairs. Kaziboni (2019) and Van Hout and Wessels (2023) describe Lindela Repatriation Centre as a site of systemic abuse, overcrowding, and legal neglect. The South African Human Rights Commission (1999, 2000) has similarly exposed routine violations at Lindela. Vigneswaran et al. (2010) highlight how enforcement often operates through informal and discretionary practices. Therefore, parole applied to foreign nationals feeds directly into this system, purporting to support reintegration while serving as a funnel into immigration detention and deportation.

Xenophobia, penal nationalism and the state

A fuller understanding of the parole-deportation nexus requires engagement with the politics of xenophobia and penal nationalism. Peberdy (2009) and Landau (2011) illustrate how immigration policy has been used to construct a radicalized post-apartheid nation, framing migrants as threats to security and sovereignty. Misago (2017) links community violence against foreigners to state discourse and practice. Neocosmos (2010) argues that post-apartheid citizenship has been politicized to exclude migrants from rights-bearing subjectivity. Brower (2020) situates these dynamics in penal terms, describing parole and incarceration as instruments of penal nationalism through which the state performs sovereignty by punishing and expelling outsiders. Against this backdrop, parole for non-citizens cannot be understood as an administrative anomaly, but as part of a wider project of exclusion.

Comparative perspectives

Internationally, South Africa's approach resonates with, but also diverges from, other crimmigration regimes. In the United Kingdom, the Early Removal Scheme allows foreign national prisoners to be released up to 270 days before their earliest release date, on condition of deportation. While this scheme is governed by primary legislation under the UK Borders Act 2007, it similarly converts conditional release into a mechanism of migration control, subordinating rehabilitation to removal (Turnbull and Hasselberg, 2019). At the European Union level, the EU Return Directive (Directive 2008/115/EC) similarly integrates penal and immigration functions by establishing common standards for the return of irregularly staying third-country nationals, and has been widely criticized for prioritising removal over detainee rights protections. In Namibia, the Transfer of Convicted Offenders Act 9 of 2005 provides a statutory basis for transferring foreign national prisoners to their home countries to complete their sentences. While this offers a repatriation framework that at least acknowledges the rights of the offender during the transfer process, it similarly forecloses rehabilitation within the country of incarceration. What these comparisons collectively highlight is a global pattern in which parole and conditional release mechanisms are increasingly instrumentalized for border enforcement. South Africa is however distinctive in governing this process not through primary legislation but through internal SOPs that lack statutory authority, democratic oversight and judicial accountability. Whereas the UK and EU frameworks, however imperfect, operate within legislatively defined parameters, South Africa relies on administrative directives that have never been subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. This absence of statutory regulation is therefore not merely a technical oversight but a structural feature of the South African crimmigration system, one that generates the conditions for the anomic crimmigration zone theorized in this article.

Conceptual anchors and original contribution

Four conceptual lenses guide this analysis. First, bifurcated justice (Turnbull and Hasselberg, 2019 – the existence of two parallel systems of justice, one rehabilitative for citizens and one expulsive for non-citizens) explains how two regimes of parole operate in parallel. Second, adiaphorization (Bauman, 2016 – the moral disengagement that renders migrants’ suffering irrelevant) highlights how foreign parolees are treated as outside the moral obligations owed to ‘ordinary’ offenders. Third, drawing on Agamben (1998), the article develops the figure of the peregrinum homo sacer. The Latin word peregrinus refers to a foreigner and captures how South African authorities homogenize diverse migrant categories, including documented and undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, into a single administratively managed figure of exclusion. In this sense, parole produces a subject who is doubly right less, excluded from penal rehabilitation while simultaneously stripped of migration protections.

Finally, the article advances the concept of the anomic crimmigration zone. This adapts Durkheim's (1893) notion of anomie – the collapse of normative frameworks, producing ‘normlessness’ – to the governance of migration. Unlike bifurcation, which presumes parallel legal tracks, or adiaphorization, which concerns moral disengagement, the anomic crimmigration zone highlights the disintegration of legality itself. It describes institutional sites such as Lindela Repatriation Centre in Johannesburg, where parole conditions dissolve into immigration detention practices, and where offenders are neither fully recognized as prisoners nor able to exercise rights available to other migrant categories. It is in this space that the peregrinum homo sacer is created and constantly reproduced.

Methodology

This study draws on qualitative research conducted as part of a broader doctoral project on sentencing, imprisonment, parole and deportation of foreign nationals in South Africa. For the purposes of this article, the analysis is narrowed to the parole-deportation nexus.

Sampling and participants

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 members of Correctional Supervision and Parole Boards (CSPBs) across eight correctional management areas in Gauteng Province. Gauteng was selected as it houses the largest proportion of foreign national inmates in South Africa, and therefore provides rich empirical material. The eight management areas included Bavianspoort, Boksburg, Johannesburg, Kgosi Mampuru II, Krugersdorp, Leeuwkop, Modderbee and Zonderwater. Interviewees were selected for their direct involvement in parole decision making. They comprised:

7 Chairpersons,

3 Vice Chairpersons,

9 Secretaries and

7 Community Members.

No separate parole boards exist for non-citizens; all parole applications are considered by CSPBs according to general procedures. This study therefore illuminates how board members interpret and apply the rules when faced with foreign national cases.

Focus of the interviews

The interviews concentrated on how parole processes function when applied to foreign nationals, including:

- The use of SOPs and not statutory legislation.

- The treatment of foreign nationals in relation to community-based sentences, correctional supervision and parole conditions.

- The administrative requirement of the ‘V-list’ of prohibited persons.

- The routine transfer of parolees to Lindela Repatriation Centre for deportation.

By foregrounding parole, the study highlights the ways in which this ostensibly rehabilitative mechanism is redirected toward exclusion and removal.

Ethical considerations

Ethical clearance was obtained through the University of the Witwatersrand, and research permission was granted by the Department of Correctional Services Research Ethics Committee. All participants were informed of the study's aims, assured of confidentiality and anonymized in reporting. Respondents are identified in the Findings only by role (e.g. Respondent X, Parole Board Member) and a pseudonymous identifier.

Data collection and analysis

Fieldwork was conducted between May and August 2023 through face-to-face interviews. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded thematically using NVivo software. Coding categories were both deductive (informed by theoretical concepts such as bifurcated justice and adiaphorization) and inductive (emerging from participants’ accounts).

Documentary analysis

In addition to interviews, the study draws on legal and policy texts, including the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998, the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977, the Immigration Act 13 of 2002 and the Department of Correctional Services SOPs (chapter 17). Particular attention is paid to how the SOPs regulate the parole of foreign nationals in the absence of statutory provisions.

Scope and limitations

The study does not include interviews with foreign national offenders themselves. This decision was taken for ethical reasons, given the precarious legal status of detainees and the risks associated with conducting interviews in prisons or Lindela. The original research was a PhD study for which the ethical clearance was granted to interview parole board members only. The focus on parole board members provides insight into institutional logics and discretionary practices, though it necessarily captures the perspectives of officials and not those subjected to the system. Importantly, this choice was also analytically deliberate: examining officials’ accounts reveals how decision-makers rationalize exclusion and normalize inequality in practice. In line with Bauman's (2016) notion of adiaphorization, attention to officials’ narratives illuminates how the suffering of foreign parolees is rendered morally irrelevant through bureaucratic reasoning. In this sense, the absence of parolees’ voices does not weaken the analysis but highlights the institutional production of indifference that sustains the crimmigration regime. This limitation is therefore acknowledged and balanced by situating officials’ accounts alongside extensive secondary literature on the experiences of foreign nationals in South African prisons and immigration detention (Amit, 2010; Kaziboni, 2019; Van Hout and Wessels, 2023).

Findings

Legal ambiguity and administrative discretion

Parole for foreign nationals is not governed by statute but by internal SOPs within the Department of Correctional Services (DCS). Chapter 17 of the SOPs outlines the procedures for the release of foreign nationals, including both those with a legal right to remain in South Africa and those without such status. However, unlike the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998, which provides the statutory framework for citizen parole, the SOPs are not a statutory regulation, thereby lacking legislative force and oversight. This creates a legal vacuum in which discretionary and administrative practices occur.

These SOP provisions explicitly deny placement if deportation has not been finalized by the DHA (SOP, par. 17.8.2). Even where deportation is pending, the CSPB is instructed to defer placement decisions until DHA confirms removal arrangements, effectively subordinating penal release to immigration control. The SOP thus transforms parole from a discretionary rehabilitative tool into a bureaucratic staging ground for deportation, illustrating what Brower (2020) describes as bordered penality, where the legal distinction between penal and immigration enforcement collapses.

The Department of Correctional Services’ reliance on chapter 17 of the SOPs creates a legal grey zone in which parole placement for foreign nationals is not governed by statute but by administrative directives. This ambiguity becomes even clearer when contrasted with the official position presented by the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services in Parliament. In 2019, responding to a question about foreign nationals in custody, the Minister emphasized that parole procedures apply equally to citizens and non-citizens (Parliamentary Question Reply, 2019). He outlined three possible outcomes: (1) documented foreign nationals may serve parole in South Africa if their permits remain valid; (2) documented foreigners whose permits are revoked are deported; and (3) undocumented foreign nationals are deported upon parole approval. While this response frames the system as orderly and lawful, the empirical data and media reports suggest otherwise. Foreign nationals are frequently detained past their parole dates, transferred automatically to Lindela, or denied access to community-based supervision, regardless of documentation status. This discrepancy between official discourse and lived practice illustrates how parole operates as an informal extension of border control, governed by opaque procedures and not than primary legislation.

Foreign nationals without a right to remain are automatically subject to deportation orders once parole is granted. The SOP specifies four uniform conditions for this group: (1) deportation and nonreturn to South Africa during the parole period; (2) obtaining authorization before any return after expiry of parole; (3) refraining from committing offences during the parole term; and (4) mandatory entry into the ‘V-list’ maintained by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and border authorities. The V-list is an internal database used to flag deported foreign nationals as ‘prohibited persons’ across police and border management systems, ensuring that they are denied lawful re-entry at ports of entry. In effect, it extends the penal sanction beyond the sentence served, creating a continuing border penalty. Placement on this V-list designates parolees as prohibited persons, blocking re-entry even after their sentence lapses (SOP, para. 17.18.3, 17.18.6).

Parole board members were explicit that this regime operates outside primary legislation:

‘Foreign offenders who receive a sec 276(1)(i) sentence… become frustrated that hey man, why can’t I be released… but according to the DCS they don’t qualify for correctional supervision. So we have to keep them until they reach their minimum half’. (Respondent 1, Parole Board Member)

Asked as to where the DCS gets its authority to override a court sentence, another respondent stated ‘(laughs) That one is difficult. It is a DCS policy’.

This illustrates the paradox: courts may sentence offenders to community supervision, but the DCS overrides this through SOP-based exclusions. The parole process thus becomes less a mechanism of reintegration than an administrative trigger for deportation.

The pains of crimmigration imprisonment

Building on Sykes’ (1958) ‘pains of imprisonment’ and Ugelvik and Damsa's (2018) ‘pains of crimmigration imprisonment’, the South African case illustrates how parole amplifies these pains, whereas it should alleviate them. Six key themes emerged in the findings as discussed below.

Denial of correctional supervision and community sentences

Section 276(1)(h) of the Criminal Procedure Act allows for community-based sentences. Foreign nationals are however categorically excluded, not by legal sanction but by DCS discretion.

As noted in the ‘Legal ambiguity and administrative discretion’ section, Respondent 1 confirmed that foreign nationals serving section 276(1)(i) sentences are denied correctional supervision and held until they reach their minimum half, on the basis of DCS policy rather than any statutory provision. This pattern was consistent across respondents and is not attributable to individual discretion but to the systematic application of the SOPs.

This exclusion, lacking statutory basis, constitutes bifurcated justice (Turnbull and Hasselberg, 2019). Citizens may transition to community-based reintegration, but for non-citizens parole eligibility itself is foreclosed, collapsing rehabilitation into deportation.

The SOP codifies this exclusionary practice. It specifies that only foreign nationals with valid residence status (e.g. asylum and permanent permits) may be considered for correctional supervision or parole (SOP, par. 17.8.3–17.8.4). By contrast, those pending deportation are automatically disqualified (SOP, par. 17.8.2). This is a clear administrative override of judicial sentencing authority and entrenches a bifurcated penal regime where citizenship determines access to community-based sanctions, instead of offence severity. Such codification exemplifies adiaphorization (Bauman, 2016), rendering non-citizen offenders morally and legally invisible as rights-bearing subjects.

Segregation in housing

Respondents confirmed systematic placement of foreign nationals in higher-security facilities (Medium C or Maximum), regardless of offence or risk.

‘Mostly they are here on C and maximum… they took them to Medium C and Maximum. This was because of their offences and also to make work easy here at the centres not to mix them…’ (Respondent 7, Parole Board Member)

This misclassification not only undermines rehabilitation but also distorts parole assessment, since parole boards consider security classification in evaluating readiness for release. It exemplifies how immigration status, and not behaviour or risk, shapes correctional outcomes, echoing Dissel's (2008) critique of apartheid-era continuities.

Exclusion from work programmes

Vocational programmes, known as SPANS, provide training, wages and rehabilitative value that parole boards formally consider when assessing readiness for release. The exclusion of foreign nationals from these programmes was one of the most consistently reported findings across respondents. It was described not as a matter of individual facility policy but as a categorical and system-wide practice, the rationale for which board members themselves could not explain. Respondent 14 captured this bluntly: ‘foreign nationals never serve or work in a span!’ (Respondent 14, Parole Board Member). Other respondents similarly observed that foreign nationals are barred from work and from the gratuity payments that South African offenders receive, and noted that at parole sittings foreign inmates routinely identified their nationality as the reason they were not working (Respondents 7 and 11, Parole Board Members). What is analytically significant here is not only the exclusion itself but the absence of any statutory or even administrative justification offered by those enforcing it. This is consistent with what Bauman (2016) describes as adiaphorization, where differential treatment of a particular group becomes so normalized within institutional culture that it no longer requires justification. The practical consequence is that foreign nationals arrive at parole hearings without the programme participation records that boards use to assess rehabilitation, compounding the structural disadvantage already created by their ineligibility for correctional supervision.

Delays in release and deportability

Respondents described consistent delays in releasing foreign parolees due to Home Affairs’ failure to provide deportation warrants:

‘Sometimes they stay weeks, even months, after their parole is granted. We can’t release them without Home Affairs paperwork, so they sit’. (Respondent 9, Parole Board Member)

These delays effectively impose unlawful additional sentences, transforming parole into prolonged detention without judicial sanction (Amit, 2013).

Absence of cross-border supervision

A consistent finding across respondents was that foreign nationals are not placed under correctional supervision after release, precisely because they are removed from South African territory. As Respondent PB3-CH explained:

‘The difference is that they are not placed under correctional supervision. They are only placed on parole… the main reason for not placing them under correctional supervision is that they cannot do community services within South Africa’.

This produces a structurally distinct parole regime. While parole for South African citizens entails long-term correctional supervision, monitoring and continued institutional responsibility, parole for foreign nationals culminates in detention at Lindela and subsequent deportation, with no further oversight by community corrections. Respondent PB1-S framed this disparity as a form of institutional benefit:

‘When a South African is paroled, for the next 5 or 10 years he is still our asset… Foreign nationals they go home and all is well’.

These accounts reveal a perception among parole officials that deportation functions as a form of leniency and not a form of monitored punishment in the context of parole. From this institutional perspective, the removal of foreign nationals from South African territory is understood as relieving the state of ongoing supervisory obligations.

A central contradiction therefore emerges between this perception and the lived consequences of expulsion. This interpretation rests on a narrow understanding of punishment as domestic supervision alone. For foreign nationals, deportation constitutes a permanent form of exclusion from social membership, family life, employment, and legal residence. The loss of territorial belonging, combined with immigration blacklisting and the threat of re-detention upon attempted return, produces a qualitatively different and often more severe form of sanction. What parole boards interpret as leniency is therefore experienced as intensified penal exclusion.

This divergence between rehabilitative supervision for citizens and expulsion for foreign nationals exemplifies bifurcated injustice, where formally identical penal mechanisms yield fundamentally unequal outcomes along citizenship lines. South African citizens remain under correctional rehabilitative monitoring, whereas foreign nationals are expelled from both the correctional system and the national community. In this way, punishment is not resolved through deportation but reconfigured across legal regimes, with parole functioning less as reintegration than exclusion.

Long-distance relationships

Respondents acknowledged the absence of family support for many foreign inmates:

‘For South Africans, families can visit. For foreigners, their families are far. They don’t get that support’. (PB6-CH)

Parole presupposes the availability of support networks to facilitate reintegration; however, for non-citizens, geographical distance and exclusion from rehabilitative programmes undermine this intended outcome, thereby reinforcing crimmigration-specific pains. At the same time, respondents also recognized that deportation severs family relationships that are already established within South Africa. As Respondent PB1-VC observed, ‘sometimes we are sending people back home who have families this side in South Africa’. Deportation functions as an administrative measure that fails to account for existing family ties, with the effect that parole operates primarily as a mechanism of exclusion.

Lindela: Post-parole detention and the anomic crimmigration zone

Once parole is granted, foreign nationals without the right to reside are transferred to Lindela Repatriation Centre. Here, parole conditions cease to operate and the detainees are treated not as parolees under correctional supervision but as immigration cases awaiting removal. In this sense, parole for non-citizens becomes a pipeline into Lindela, transforming a mechanism of supervised reintegration into one of indefinite administrative detention.

Lindela has long been the subject of sustained criticism by the South African Human Rights Commission (1999, 2000), civil society organizations, and scholars (Amit, 2010, 2012, 2013; Kaziboni, 2019; Van Hout and Wessels, 2023). Multiple reports consistently document complaints of overcrowding, abuse, corruption, and lack of due process. Outsourcing its operations to private contractors entrenched a profit motive: for years Lindela was run by BOSASA (later African Global Operations), a company exposed by the Zondo Commission of Enquiry into State Capture (2020) for ‘industrial-scale corruption’. Today, detention continues under new security providers, but the underlying logic of commodifying migrants as ‘detention-for-profit’ bodies remains.

Moreover, the ineffectiveness of judicial oversight further entrenches Lindela's exceptional status. As Amit (2013) documents, the Department of Home Affairs has repeatedly disregarded court orders instructing the release of unlawfully detained migrants. This persistent defiance of judicial authority exemplifies how parolees, once transferred to Lindela, enter an institutional space where constitutional and statutory protections are effectively suspended. Lindela thus operates not only as an administrative detention site but as a paradigmatic anomic crimmigration zone, where the authority of law itself is hollowed out by bureaucratic discretion and systemic disregard for the courts.

This facility's history and practices exemplify what this article conceptualizes as an anomic crimmigration zone: a space where legal categories collapse and individuals are governed in the absence of clear statutory authority. Parolees lose their legal protections once transferred here, falling outside the Correctional Services Act while not fully incorporated into the Immigration Act. Neither recognized as parolees nor as protected migrants, they occupy a legal void where administrative discretion rules.

Framing Lindela as an anomic crimmigration zone advances the analysis in two ways. First, it reveals how parole has been subsumed into the logic of migration enforcement, stripping it of rehabilitative intent and redirecting it toward exclusion. Second, it demonstrates that governance in this space is not merely bifurcated between citizens and non-citizens but fundamentally anomic, characterized by the collapse of legality itself. Lindela thus emerges as a critical site where penal and migration regimes intersect, producing the peregrinum homo sacer: the foreigner deprived of both penal and migration rights, reduced to bare deportability. Non-citizen parolees therefore join a pool of other detained migrants at Lindela already stripped of their respective immigration categories and protections. This underscores how parole functions as a node within South Africa's crimmigration hub, where the anomic crimmigration zone continually reproduces the peregrinum homo sacer.

Deportation as punishment, not reintegration

Deportation following parole is framed administratively as removal, but in practice it functions as punishment. Foreign nationals are stripped of access to rehabilitation, severed from family and community ties in South Africa, and returned to precarious circumstances in their countries of origin.

Furthermore, unlike voluntary repatriation (provided for in the Immigration Act 13 of 2002), deportation of foreign parolees is involuntary and exclusionary. Once transferred to Lindela, parolees lose all procedural protections of correctional parole and become indistinguishable from undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.

Parole board members themselves have questioned the efficacy of this system:

‘I think rather deport them before sentencing or at the point of sentencing, it is a fruitless exercise to sentence them, imprison them and then release them on parole if we are unable to control them once they are released’. (Respondent 4, Parole Board Member)

This supports the view that parole for foreign nationals is not about rehabilitation but about removal, functioning as a tool through which the state asserts its authority by excluding those it deems undesirable.

Discussion

While this study draws primarily on interviews with parole board members and documentary analysis, it was not possible to interview foreign parolees directly. This limitation reflects both access constraints and ethical concerns, particularly in relation to individuals held at Lindela under conditions of administrative detention. However, existing qualitative research conducted at Lindela and similar sites provides important insight into migrants’ experiences of detention and deportation. Studies consistently show that deportation is experienced as coercive, disruptive and deeply punitive, particularly where individuals have established family, social and economic ties in South Africa (Amit, 2010; Kaziboni, 2019). These findings suggest that deportation is not generally understood by affected individuals as a desirable alternative to supervised release, but rather as an extension of exclusion and punishment. Drawing on this literature allows the present analysis to situate parole board perspectives within the broader lived experiences of those subjected to the parole-deportation nexus.

The findings illustrate how parole often functions as a pathway into bordered penality (Aas, 2014) instead of serving as a bridge to reintegration. For non-citizens, parole marks the beginning of a second phase of exclusion: transfer to Lindela and eventual deportation. This reflects bifurcated justice (Turnbull and Hasselberg, 2019), where two systems of conditional release operate simultaneously. It is sustained through adiaphorization (Bauman, 2016), which renders foreign parolees morally irrelevant and allows officials to frame deportation as leniency. It also produces the figure of the peregrinum homo sacer – the foreigner stripped of both penal and migration rights.

Lindela exemplifies an anomic crimmigration zone where parole dissolves into immigration detention and migrants are governed outside statutory frameworks (Hiropoulos, 2017).

Bifurcated justice in practice

Turnbull and Hasselberg's (2019) notion of bifurcated justice captures how citizen parole is framed by law and rehabilitation, while non-citizen parole is reduced to administrative deportation without community supervision. The contradiction between the government's formal assurances and the realities experienced by foreign parolees exemplifies bifurcated justice. In practice, non-citizens are subject to automatic deportation processes, prolonged detention due to administrative delays, and exclusion from community-based rehabilitation. Media accounts of ‘foreigners languishing’ in prisons after parole approval (Hlatshaneni, 2020; Postman, 2020) reinforce the testimony of parole board members who described systemic barriers to releasing foreign inmates. This duality, with formal equality in law but real inequality in practice, shows how parole has become a central site for the enforcement of bordered penality. As Vigneswaran et al. (2010) argue, the South African state often constructs parallel and informal enforcement channels to manage migration. Parole has become one such channel, working outside formal law while still appearing legal.

Building on this framework, this article advances the concept of bifurcated injustice to capture an additional and paradoxical dimension of inequality produced through parole. Foreign nationals are not only subjected to the punitive effects of detention and deportation while being excluded from the rehabilitative and supervisory dimensions of parole, but are also released from the ongoing obligations that bind South African citizens to the correctional system. While citizens remain subject to long-term monitoring and the risk of parole revocation, foreign nationals are deported and thereby freed from all correctional supervision. Parole board members frequently interpret this absence of supervision as an advantage or a ‘clean break’ from the penal system. This perception, however, represents a distortion of parole's central logic as conditional liberty under supervision. Bifurcated injustice thus captures a twofold inequality: non-citizens experience intensified exclusion through deportability, while citizens remain burdened by the continuing obligations and risks of parole, revealing how punishment and care are unevenly distributed along citizenship lines.

Adiaphorization and the moral erasure of migrants

The perceptions of parole board members that foreign nationals ‘benefit’ from deportation demonstrate the operation of adiaphorization (Bauman, 2016). By viewing deportation as leniency, officials erase the human consequences of exclusion. These include being separated from family, facing economic insecurity or becoming stateless. Deportation is framed as relief from the obligations of parole and not as an extension of punishment. This framing is sustained through bureaucratic practices that treat delays in release as routine administration rather than unlawful detention. In this way, adiaphorization operates both discursively and institutionally, normalizing arrangements that intensify the pains of imprisonment for non-citizens.

Lindela and the anomic crimmigration zone

The funnelling of parolees into Lindela illustrates how administrative detention operates as what I refer to as an ‘anomic crimmigration zone’. At Lindela, legal categories collapse: foreign parolees transferred from the correctional system, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants detained through immigration enforcement are treated alike. This homogenization reflects the collapse of legal protections and the creation of what Vigneswaran et al. (2010) describe as parallel enforcement channels. The Zondo Commission's (2020) revelations about corruption and private profiteering further underscore how migration governance is shaped by penal nationalism and state capture. Lindela shows that parole and deportation are not neutral procedures but spaces where the state asserts control by excluding and exploiting migrants.

This legal funnel is explicitly constructed in the SOP. Once admitted into the system of community corrections for administrative purposes, foreign parolees must be handed over to the DHA and transferred to Lindela Repatriation Centre (SOP, par. 17.14.1–17.15.2). In effect, Lindela is not merely a detention site but the designated destination for parole of deportable foreigners. By designating Lindela as the required transfer point, the SOP creates an anomic crimmigration zone where parole rules lose significance and detainees are subjected to control and exploitation.

The Peregrinum homo sacer

Drawing on Agamben's (1998) homo sacer, the study advances the concept of the peregrinum homo sacer: the foreigner reduced to bare deportability through the detention-deportation process and without the legal protections afforded by migration law. The Latin peregrinus ‘foreigner’ captures how South African authorities collapse distinctions between documented, undocumented, refugee and asylum seeker, treating all as equally subject to exclusion. Parole produces a doubly vulnerable subject, one who is denied both citizen rehabilitation and migrant protections. This conceptualization links the empirical findings to broader debates on crimmigration while remaining grounded in the South African context.

The peregrinum homo sacer is not an abstract condition but the product of codified administrative practices. Chapter 17 of the SOP requires parole boards to defer release until deportation is arranged (par. 17.8.2), to attach special conditions of exile (par. 17.8.6), and to hand over parolees to DHA custody at Lindela (par. 17.14–17.15). Through these steps, the SOP enshrines a zone of indistinction (Agamben, 1998), where criminal punishment flows seamlessly into immigration exclusion alongside other peregrinum who are produced through additional immigration enforcement paths besides these correctional processes. Foreign parolees therefore occupy a legal vacuum in which they are neither protected as parolees nor fully recognized as migrants, thereby falling outside the protections associated with both parole and migration regimes.

The analysis above describes the primary pathway through which the peregrinum homo sacer is produced, namely through the SOP-driven pipeline from correctional centre to Lindela to deportation. The empirical data from this study, however, point to a second and analytically distinct pathway that warrants explicit attention: what may be described as incarceration-induced status displacement. This refers to the production of unlawful presence as a structurally inevitable consequence of a criminal sentence whose duration exceeds the validity of the offender's immigration permit. A foreign national may enter the South African criminal justice system as a lawfully present person, holding a valid visa, asylum permit, or other immigration document. During the period of imprisonment, that permit lapses. No immigration enforcement decision is made. No action is taken by the Department of Home Affairs. No exercise of discretion occurs. The permit expires as an automatic administrative consequence of the passage of time against its validity period. By the time the person reaches parole eligibility, they have already been reclassified, in administrative terms, from a lawfully present resident into an unlawfully present person. The SOP then processes them in the same manner as any other deportable foreign national, regardless of the fact that their unlawful presence was not a pre-existing condition but was produced by the sentence itself.

This pathway is analytically significant for several reasons. First, it identifies a crimmigration mechanism that operates entirely within the correctional system without any action by the DHA, without any immigration enforcement operation, and without any exercise of institutional discretion. The criminal sentence, by virtue of its duration relative to the permit's validity, is the instrument that produces the condition of deportability. Second, there is no provision in either the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998 or the Immigration Act 13 of 2002 that accounts for this situation. Neither Act creates any mechanism for renewing or extending a permit from within a correctional centre, nor any obligation on any department to notify the affected person or to defer deportation on the ground that the unlawful presence arose through the operation of the sentence rather than through any act of the individual. Third, and most significantly for the SOP's role in producing the peregrinum homo sacer, the SOP is the instrument through which this status displacement is captured and given institutional form. It classifies the person whose permit has lapsed during imprisonment as a deportable foreign national subject to the parole-to-Lindela pipeline, regardless of the origins of that status. What unifies both pathways is therefore not the mechanism of status production but the SOP itself, which absorbs the correctional deportee into the same removal regime whether their unlawful presence preceded the sentence or was generated by it. Both categories of foreign national arrive at Lindela as peregrinum homo sacer. The difference lies in when and how that condition was produced. In the case of incarceration-induced status displacement, the correctional system itself is the crimmigration mechanism, operating before the parole-Lindela pathway is engaged at all. This further underscores the argument that in South Africa, the absence of statutory safeguards in both the correctional and immigration frameworks creates a structural vulnerability that no exercise of administrative discretion can adequately address.

Recommendations

The evidence presented in this study underscores that parole for foreign nationals in South Africa functions less as a rehabilitative mechanism and more as an extension of immigration control. While parole is constitutionally framed as a tool of reintegration, foreign nationals encounter it as a bureaucratic pathway to exclusion, detention and eventual deportation. Addressing these challenges requires both incremental reforms within existing frameworks and broader systemic changes.

Department of correctional services (DCS-specific reforms)

Codifying clear legal standards

The absence of statutory regulation for the parole of foreign nationals creates an accountability vacuum. Chapter 17 of the SOPs currently governs their release, but this internal document lacks transparency and democratic legitimacy. As Louw and Luyt (2009a) argue, reliance on SOPs fragments decision making and fosters inconsistency across management areas. Incorporating parole procedures for non-citizens into the Correctional Services Act could provide clarity, establish minimum rights and reduce arbitrary application of rules. Importantly, statutory reform should go beyond simply codifying existing SOPs. Instead, it should establish principles that ensure equitable treatment, proportionality and respect for due process. Chapter 17 currently operates as administrative policy without statutory authority, raising constitutional concerns regarding legality, equality and separation of powers. Its provisions (pars. 17.8–17.15) effectively subordinate parole to immigration control without parliamentary oversight. A key reform must be to incorporate parole procedures for foreign nationals into legislation, ensuring transparency, judicial review and compliance with constitutional rights.

Equal access to correctional programmes

Foreign nationals should be afforded access to rehabilitative programmes, vocational training and community-based sentences while serving their custodial terms. Denying such access on the basis of citizenship undermines the rehabilitative purpose of parole and entrenches bifurcated justice. Ensuring such inclusion during incarceration would mitigate some of the disparities that occur at the point of parole.

Documentation and monitoring

DCS should also improve record-keeping and transparency regarding foreign parolees transferred to Lindela. Data on the length of detention beyond parole approval, numbers affected, and eventual outcomes should be published. Such monitoring would reduce arbitrary extensions of confinement and create an evidence base for reform.

Inter-departmental coordination (DCS–home affairs)

Findings revealed frequent delays in release for foreign parolees due to administrative paralysis between DCS and the DHA. Offenders often languish in custody weeks or months beyond their lawful release dates while waiting for deportation paperwork. This not only violates their rights but undermines the credibility of the parole system.

To address this, reforms should include:

- Establishing statutory time limits on the period a foreign parolee may be held in DCS facilities once parole is approved.

- Creating joint oversight structures between DCS, DHA, and SAPS to ensure prompt transfer and prevent unlawful detention.

- Formalizing protocols for communication with parole boards, ensuring decisions are not undermined by bureaucratic inertia.

These reforms would not stop deportations entirely but could reduce the worst abuses in the current anomic crimmigration system, where parole effectively becomes indefinite immigration detention.

Alternatives to detention

Currently, the only post-parole pathway for undocumented or prohibited foreign nationals is transfer to Lindela. This creates a de facto double punishment: first imprisonment, then immigration detention. Viable alternatives should be considered, including:

Supervized voluntary repatriation programmes, offering structured but non-carceral return.

Conditional release to community-based organizations pending deportation.

Bilateral transfer agreements allowing sentence completion in home countries.

Comparative models, such as Namibia's Transfer of Convicted Offenders Act (2005) and the UK's Early Removal Scheme provide instructive examples of integrating repatriation with reintegration rather than exclusion, despite some administrative imperfections.

Oversight and accountability at Lindela

Lindela Repatriation Centre has been repeatedly implicated in human rights abuses, corruption and lack of due process (Amit, 2010; Kaziboni, 2019; Van Hout and Wessels, 2023). Outsourcing to private contractors has entrenched a profit-driven detention logic, as revealed by the Zondo Commission (2020). Parliamentary committees, judicial inspectors and civil society organizations should be granted regular and independent access to monitor conditions.

Furthermore, Lindela should be legally recognized as a site of detention subject to the Correctional Services Act and the Constitution, as opposed to an administrative grey zone. Independent oversight by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) could help close the legal vacuum in which Lindela currently operates.

Addressing structural xenophobia and penal nationalism

Beyond legal and procedural reforms, meaningful change requires addressing the broader logics that underpin South Africa's penal and migration systems. As the findings revealed, parole board members often described deportation as a ‘benefit’ for foreign nationals, reflecting a moral blindness to the actual harms of exclusion. Training programmes, rights-based guidelines and public awareness campaigns could help shift these attitudes.

More fundamentally, the criminalization of migration itself must be questioned. Until migration governance moves beyond a paradigm of threat and exclusion, parole will continue to serve as an instrument of border enforcement and not a process culminating in rehabilitation. Recognizing parole as a node within broader patterns of bordered penality and anomic crimmigration zones helps to highlight that technical reforms to SOPs are necessary but insufficient.

Reflecting on the above recommendations

Recent border abolition scholarship has challenged the assumption that injustices within migration systems can be resolved through legal reform alone. Scholars such as Walia (2021) argue that borders operate as instruments of radicalized and class-based exclusion, and that migration control regimes often function to entrench global inequalities. From this perspective, the shift from administrative normlessness to legal regulation advocated in this article cannot, in itself, address the deeper forms of structural violence that shape migration governance.

This article therefore does not claim that the introduction of primary legislation would humanize migration control in any comprehensive sense. Instead, it advances a more limited argument that the current reliance on internal prison policy to govern foreign national parole produces a condition of legal insecurity characterized by arbitrariness, opacity and excessive institutional discretion. While abolitionist critiques underscore the limitations of legal reform as a solution to migration injustice, the absence of binding legislative safeguards in this specific context generates an intensified vulnerability that warrants immediate juridical attention.

What emerges from these recommendations is a paradox. While incremental reforms may reduce the most severe harms of parole for foreign nationals, they however cannot transform the system's underlying function as a node or spoke in the crimmigration wheel. One should be cautioned against assuming that statutory reform alone could secure fairness and human dignity. While codification, improved coordination or enhanced oversight may mitigate immediate injustices and enhance transparency, they leave intact the broader structures through which parole operates as an extension of a crimmigration control system. In this sense, the South African case resonates with critical criminological scholarship that highlights how law itself can reproduce inequality (Alexander, 2010; Neocosmos, 2010). This underscores the theoretical point advanced in this article: non-citizen parole functions within an anomic crimmigration zone where legality collapses, categories dissolve and exclusion becomes normalized. Technical reforms are necessary to reduce the worst abuses, but they cannot, on their own, undo the punitive logics of xenophobia, penal nationalism and migration governance that structure the system.

At the same time, rejecting liberal reformism altogether would ignore opportunities for incremental improvement. Legal codification could limit the most arbitrary applications of SOPs, reduce prolonged detention through clearer timelines, and impose minimum standards of accountability on parole boards. The challenge is to balance pragmatic reforms with recognition that deeper transformations are needed to disrupt the xenophobic logics of the crimmigration state.

Conclusion

For non-citizens, parole in South Africa collapses into immigration detention and deportation, producing the peregrinum homo sacer: the parolee stripped of both penal and migration rights.

The implications extend beyond South Africa. Comparative experience demonstrates that parole is increasingly instrumentalised for border enforcement, whether through early removal schemes in the United Kingdom, EU return directives or repatriation agreements in Namibia. Yet South Africa is distinctive in governing foreign parolees not by statute but through internal SOPs and administrative mechanisms such as the Home Affairs ‘V-list’ of prohibited persons. This reliance on administrative discretion without statutory safeguards creates systemic risks of arbitrariness and prolonged unlawful detention.

At the same time, the study cautions against assuming that codification or legal reform alone will resolve these injustices. Without addressing the structural drivers of xenophobia, the punitive logics of penal nationalism, and the entanglement of migration governance with state capture, reforms may simply reproduce exclusion in more formalized ways. Incremental reforms such as codifying parole procedures, streamlining inter-departmental coordination and strengthening oversight of detention facilities, can mitigate some of the most harmful practices. They must however be understood as harm-reduction measures instead of than transformative solutions.

In conclusion, parole for non-citizens in South Africa reveals the deep entanglement of criminal justice and migration control, where the statutory promise of rehabilitation collapses into the reality of exclusion. By tracing how parole itself becomes a spoke in the wheel of crimmigration, this article contributes both empirical evidence and conceptual tools for understanding the penal governance of migration. It calls for scholars, policymakers and civil society to confront not only the technical gaps in law but also the moral and political logics that render certain lives undeserving of reintegration. Only by addressing these deeper dynamics can South Africa move toward a parole system that fulfils its rehabilitative mandate as opposed to reinforcing the boundaries of exclusion.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Emmanuel O. Maravanyika

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Emmanuel O. Maravanyika is a Lecturer in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at Bindura University of Science Education, Zimbabwe, where he teaches Financial Intelligence and Security Studies. He previously held lecturing positions at the University of Botswana (2019–2023), Monash South Africa (2012–2019), and IIE Varsity College, Cape Town (2010–2012), across criminology and criminal justice. He holds an MPhil in Criminal Justice, an Honours in Criminal Justice, and a BA in Law and Humanities from the University of Cape Town, and an Advanced Certificate in Money Laundering Detection and Investigations from the University of Pretoria. He has held research and consultancy roles at the Institute for Security Studies, Cape Town. He is completing his PhD at the Wits School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, on crimmigration practices within the South African Department of Correctional Services at the parole consideration stage for foreign nationals.

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