Inmates get booked
LEEUWKOP - Inmates at prisons such as Leeuwkop Correctional Facility are using books to change their lives.
Since mid-September last year, 68 237 books have been donated to correctional centres’ Reading for Redemption programme.
Correctional Services Minister Sibusiso Ndebele said reading by inmates is pivotal in the rehabilitation of offenders.
“While a major component of the work of the Department of Correctional Services is public security, we are equally mandated by our Constitution to rehabilitate offenders and ensure that they return to society as ideal, productive citizens. The nucleus of our rehabilitation programme constitutes reading, skilling and education. As the last citadel of hope for society, we encourage offenders, and correctional officials, to read perpetually. We have made education compulsory for offenders because research informs us that 95 percent of them will return to society. An offender must leave a correctional centre with at least a skill in
one hand and a certificate in the other. Economies of the 21st Century are increasingly dependent on knowledge workers, and cultural industries are a huge component of such knowledge economies. The department is working hard at ensuring that offenders are not left out of these global developments and economies of the future. It is for this reason that the department has launched the Reading for Redemption programme, as a way of encouraging a culture of reading among offenders and society in general.”
This year, the department has been encouraged with the publishing of an anthology of poetry, entitled ‘Unchained’, written by offenders.
“Reading and writing clubs are being established in correctional facilities. We intend to do more to document the experiences of offenders and to allow their voices to be heard… Offenders are fellow human beings: they are our sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, (and) yes, they are also our children. Books, and reading, play a major role in character and identity formation. It is writers of books, because of their unfailing fascination and interest in the human condition, who are always the vanguard of those ideas that allow us to imagine new creative possibilities in the midst of contemporary developments and challenges. We call on all members of society to help build our correctional centre libraries by donating books. It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness,” the minister said.
Details: Logan Maistry 083-6444-050
