Prisoners in South Africa’s most overcrowded jail are forced to sleep in shifts because there is not enough room for all of them to lie down, the Jali Commission heard on Wednesday.
Director of the office of the inspecting judge of prisons, Gideon Morris, said the prison, Bizana, in the Transkei, was 470% overcrowded.
Built for 54 people, it currently held 254 prisoners, while the new C-Max prison at Kokstad, barely 100km away, had only six percent of the 1 440 prisoners it was designed for.
His office had asked the Eastern Cape commissioner of
correctional services to move some of the Bizana prisoners to Kokstad to relieve the overcrowding.
Morris said the United Nations norm was 3,5 square metres of cell space per prisoner.
However, overcrowding in South Africa’s jails meant that 57 500 prisoners had only 1,2 metres of space each. And in this space, the spent at least 23 hours a day.
The inspectorate had even heard of cases where prisoners did not want to take their one hour of daily exercise, for fear they would loose their bed-space and have to sleep next to the cell toilet.
Morris said the authorities urgently needed to find ways of keeping more awaiting trial prisoners out of jail. Most of them were not accused of violent or sexual crimes, he said. – Sapa