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

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.