As I suggested in chapter 2, comprehension of a legal culture, and the role of legal formalism within it, depends on relating the various discourses about law to each other. To understand the criminal law one must encompass the thinking about crime, criminals and criminality, and penology. Contextualisation means more than setting law or criminology within a background of ‘society’. Culler reminds us that contextualisation ‘seems to presume that the context is given, and determines the meaning of the act’ (1988: ix). But, as he says, ‘context is not given but produced’. He suggests instead the notion of ‘framing’ which ‘reminds us that framing is something that we do’. The outcome of framing criminology and criminal law is an illustration of the ways in which apparently scientific and practical areas of knowledge and activities depend on a structured imagination of selves and others. This is of particular interest in the search for an understanding of legalism in a colonial society in which racial differences are central to criminal justice.

At first sight legal preoccupations and discourses, legal methods and techniques, appear to have been strikingly separated from and different from those of criminology and penology. The imperatives of both the situation of white rule in South Africa and of the criminological and penological agenda were urgent, wide and sweeping. Yet the mechanisms of the law could at times be restricting and limiting in relation to the exercise of power.