SPEECH BY JAMES SELFE MP
DA SHADOW MINISTER OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICES 25 MARCH 2010

Correctional Services: DA does not support the budget vote

I would like to start by paying tribute to the many thousands of dedicated women and men who staff the Department. Theirs is not a glamorous job: it is frequently dangerous and does not pay very well, yet it is one of those jobs that has to be done, and most do it professionally and with dedication. These people strive against huge odds to make a difference, to rehabilitate offenders and to minimise the re-offending rate. To these people, we say: thank you for what you do to reduce crime in South Africa.

There are other officials, of course, who do not maintain these standards, who are corrupt, who are in league with the gangsters and who abuse their position of power. These officials take bribes and smuggle contraband into the prisons, they allow the gangs to conduct their illegal activities in prisons, they abuse sick leave and sleep on duty. We cannot express strongly enough our disgust at the conduct of these officials.

The Department of Correctional Services plays a central role in the fight against crime. If the men and women who staff that Department fail to correct offending behaviour and fail to rehabilitate offenders, we will simply release back into society people who have become more criminalised as a result of their imprisonment - graduates, if you like, of the University of Real Crime. In these circumstances, crime will simply get more wide-spread and more violent.

So the question is: is the Department helping to win the war against crime? Or are our prisons merely "An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse" (to quote the title of a book)?

In 2005, the Cabinet approved the White Paper on Correctional Services. This was, and still is, a very far-sighted document. It properly places rehabilitation and re-integration at the centre of the business of corrections, and boldly moves away from the idea that imprisonment consists of simply warehousing inmates, and releasing them so that they can offend again.

The White Paper demanded of the Department that it change its attitudes, re-orientate its activities and re-prioritise its expenditure.

But has the White Paper been implemented, five years since its acceptance? In theory, yes. Every presentation we get from the Department pays lip-service to the White Paper, but in practice, very few of its central principles have been implemented.

For example, central to the White Paper is a tailor-made sentence plan for every offender. The reality is, however, that this applies only to sentenced offenders serving two years or more. There are no Offender Rehabilitation Plans for offenders with sentences of less than two years (which includes the vast majority of young, first-time and non-violent offenders), which counter-intuitively means that the people with the best chance of rehabilitation are effectively denied that chance.

But worse, only 8 400 or 8.3% of the 101 370 offenders serving sentences of more than 2 years have sentence plans at all at the moment.

Moreover, only some 2 700 offenders are in literacy programmes, and the Department admits that it "does not have the human resources or infrastructure to support the requirements of full-time tuition". This is code. What it means is that most young offenders are not getting any education.

The Department proudly announces that 116 115 offenders participated in social work sessions. But what does this actually mean? Once a year, once a month, once a week, or a couple of times just before release? And despite section 40 of the Act, which obliges offenders to work, only a handful of offenders are in productive employment.

The best illustration about how little things have fundamentally changed is in the percentage of the budget that is allocated for the various programmes within this Vote. In the 2005/6 financial year, security and corrections consumed 43.45% of the budget; this year they consume 44.46%. In 2005/6 Development and Reintegration got 8.02% of the budget; this year these programmes get 7.28%. So despite the fact that the White Paper calls for a radical reorientation, the Department carries on regardless!

Not properly resourcing development means that offenders emerge from sentences without skills to look after themselves. Small wonder, then, that so many of them reoffend. Not properly resourcing reintegration means that too few offenders are released on parole, and that the judiciary has too little faith in alternative non-custodial sentences. The result is that the prisons become chronically overcrowded with offenders serving relatively short sentences.

If the DCS wants to make a difference in the fight against crime, it needs to make a huge shift in emphasis. We have made this point before, repeatedly, in the Committee and in these debates. But it seems the Department is not listening.

Instead, the Department builds a facility in Kimberley that was completed 18 months late and which doubled in price, a facility that commissioned contractors who by all accounts were paid for services they did not render. It is a Department that for more than five years has been incapable of making up its mind whether or not to proceed with the construction of more PPP prisons, thereby doing huge damage to the Government's reputation as a reliable institution with which to do business.

It is a Department that since 2001 has had eight successive qualified audits. It is a Department that installs hugely expensive security turnstiles and automated doors that have to be over-ridden because they no longer work. This same Department awarded catering contracts to a company that was investigated by the SIU and found to have irregularly influenced tender specifications. Yet this Department awarded the very same company multi-million Rand contracts as recently as last year. It is a Department that spent almost R2 million on unnecessary adverts while it couldn't find the money to employ social workers. It is a Department where many managers seem incapable of managing, where senior officials have been caught up in travel and housing scandals, where employees abscond from work without consequences, and where too many employees are corrupt, as was evidenced by the report of the Special Investigating Unit and the escape of Ananias Mathe from Pretoria C Max. It is a Department that has had three National Commissioners in as many years, and more acting personnel than in an average dramatic production.

Under these circumstances, should we be supporting this budget vote? I don't think so.

Statement issued by James Selfe, MP, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of correctional services, March 25 2010

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