We can now turn our attention to the criminal law and to its relationship with the discourses about crime. Criminal law, as Garland has written (1985: 103), is limited as a disciplinary mechanism. ‘It functions through the specification and prohibition of definite acts and is thereby limited to the policing of these acts, rather than the general inspection/control of individuals themselves.’ In South Africa there was perhaps not so great a tension between the jurisprudential approach to offenders and that of the new criminology. While the criminal law, like that of England, was built on the notion of individual responsibility, it was not set within a nominally liberal political culture into which this notion became naturalised. For, as Garland observed, in the new criminology there no longer existed a ‘universe of free and equal legal subjects, which coincides with the sane adult population … Neither reason nor responsibility can any longer be simply presumed in the presence of juveniles, vagrants, habituals, inebriates or the feeble minded’ (1985: 25). South African politics had little in the way of a liberal orthodoxy. The state was a creation of the imperial state, with its overarching ideology of explicit racist hierarchies, exploitative efficiency and regulation. In South Africa it was the bulk of the population who were considered to be not wholly adult either culturally or politically, and who all could be consigned to the categories Garland listed.