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Colonialism has had an influence on many sectors across the board in South Africa, including the prison system. Its impact could be seen in the way prisoners were treated during the post-colonial and apartheid eras. This paper seeks to demonstrate the relationship between colonial, post-colonial, and apartheid penological practices by examining the treatment of prisoners during these periods. The examination of this relationship may be useful to understand what really informed the promulgation of racist policies during the post-colonial and apartheid periods. This paper contends that the legislation that was promulgated during the post-colonial and apartheid periods, which comprised legislative instruments on how prisoners were treated, was in fact a formalisation and continuation of what had already been practised during the colonial era. The following themes are central to this discourse: the colonial period between the 1840s and 1909, the post-colonial period between 1910 and 1948, and the National Party (apartheid) era between 1948 and 1993. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]