STEVEN MANN, Cape Town | Friday 12.45pm.
CONTRARY to widespread media reports and statements by senior government officials, Correctional Services Minister Ben Skosana on Friday insisted his department is still in command of the country’s prisons.
“At no point … did I lose control of the administration of my department,” Skosana told Parliament.
His comments follow a scathing report released by the Public Service Commission last month, stating that the government had lost total control of the department. Skosana said while there were problems in prisons, such statements are “unfounded and baseless” and were “also potentially very dangerous for the security of our correctional officers in the prisons as well as the internal security of the state as a whole”.
Overcrowding remained the department’s biggest worry, Skosana said. Of particular concern was the number of unsentenced prisoners in custody. Last month this figure stood at 62952 or 40% of the total number of people in prison.
“From January 1995 to February of this year, the number of unsentenced prisoners increased by 158% compared to an increase of 15 percent over the same period.”
Many prisons were also in a serious state of disrepair, and the department planned to start using prison labor to maintain them. Skosana said three new prisons would be opened soon – one at Kokstad with 1440 beds, one at Empangeni with 1392 beds and the country’s first “pre-release centre” at Devon with 650 beds.