Not yet guilty, but still imprisoned for years

An awaiting-trial prisoner in South Africa can wait as long as three years to have his or her day in court, according to a former prison employee at Modderbee Correctional Centre in Springs.

This prison has been known to house around 3,000 awaiting-trial prisoners at a time, many of whom may not sleep on an actual bed the for their entire stay. The facility has been embroiled in state capture-related scandals and been fraught with constant tension among prisoners, warders and management.

While living conditions at the prison have been sub-par for most of its inmates, according to the warder, life is worse for awaiting-trial prisoners.

“They don’t live the same as the others,” he says. “For example, the awaiting-trial prisoners have no beds. I really don’t know why, but they sleep on blankets on the concrete floor. The last time I checked there were about 3,000 awaiting-trial prisoners.

“They can spend around two to three years in those cells. They just take two blankets and make a bed. They fight, they rob each other’s clothes and possessions and there is rape as well.”

Pollsmoor Prison in the Western Cape is famously one of the most overcrowded correctional facilities in the country, with its Medium B section, which houses males, at over 200% of capacity.

According to the World Prison Brief website, about 30% of prisoners in South Africa are still awaiting trial.

But for US prisoner rights activist Prof Baz Dreisinger, these issues are not unique to South Africa, or even Africa.

Dreisinger, author of the book Incarceration Nations, has been spreading the message of prison justice and reform the world over. She is critical of criminal justice systems and how their failure to properly rehabilitate criminals and failing court systems have turned prisons into crime factories that create hardened criminals.

“First of all, I don’t come to any country to point fingers at their government but rather to offer a constructive solution and, also, I always speak from a global perspective. You know some places are better than others.

“I have come here a lot and I’ve engaged with the prison system here and I always speak from a global perspective because this is a global crisis. There are many problems and there are many potential solutions too. When it comes to pretrial detention, that is a global crisis; it is especially prominent in countries in West Africa.”

Studies on recidivism in South Africa indicate that around 50% to 70% of offenders return to prison within three years of release.

But Dreisinger says given the conditions that all detainees live under in South Africa’s correctional facilities, even awaiting-trial prisoners are at risk of becoming more embroiled in criminality as a result of being imprisoned and waiting months and even years for their cases to conclude.

“When you detain people, besides the human rights issues, you are also exposing people who already come from harmful conditions to further harm and trauma, and potentially innocent people could end up in situations that are further damaging and they are more likely to commit an actual crime in prison or when they are out. We like to use the term criminogenic, which describes the way prisons actually produce crime.”

Dreisinger’s approach is that, in Africa, for example, prison systems were inherited from colonial governments, which did not design criminal justice systems with the human rights of Africans in mind. This, coupled with the economic problems facing many African countries, saw backlogged courts, overcrowded prisons and corruption banding together to create a system which in effect simply created more criminals.

Spokesperson for the department of correctional services Singabakho Nxumalo points out that overcrowding is not uniquely rampant in South African prisons.

“The problem of overcrowding within the South African correctional system has been identified as a key challenge and is being addressed,” he says. “What must be understood is that overcrowding is a global phenomenon that undermines all the efforts by any correctional system to change the lives of offenders.”

In an effort to address this, the department says it has been implementing a multi-pronged strategy, which includes the management of the high levels of remand detainees through the integrated justice system and its development committee, as well as various specialised sub-committees, including the inter-sectoral committee on child justice.

“We are also accelerating our capital infrastructure projects, which will increase bed space by means of upgrading correctional facilities and building new correctional centres, that are cost effective and rehabilitation oriented,” said Nxumalo.

“During the month of May alone, Standerton and Estcourt correctional centres were officially opened by the former minister, Adv Michael Masutha.

“The two centres combined account for 1,998 bed spaces. A newly renovated C-Max Correctional Centre, at Kgosi Mampuru II Management Area, has been completed and will bring into the grid 283 bed spaces, while Tzaneen Correctional Centre, which is near completion, will be armed with 435 bed spaces. This is a real testimony, demonstrating DCS’s capability in terms of combating overcrowding.”

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