To many, the prison system in South Africa represents a horrifying world that we want to forget. It is a necessary evil, a home for society’s misfits. To others, it is an existence where, daily, the most difficult choices are made just to survive.

Mabaza enters a notorious Cape prison and interviews the male inmates. Adhering to a numbers system, run on military lines, all inmates are initiated into, and are bound by, the law of three gangs that rule the prisons. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, where a past offence against the gangs in another prison will catch up with you, and gang generals decide who lives and who dies, inmates and wardens alike.

This particularly one-sided view of a violent element in South Africa’s prisons will cause protracted and heated debate.