The newly appointed criminal justice cluster team has briefed the Cabinet lekgotla on its plans to reduce crime levels within the next five years and bring them in line with international standards.
But the first step will have to be to resolve the disjunctures in the cluster that have resulted in the participating departments having different, often contradictory, priorities.
The justice, crime prevention and security cluster consists of the Department of Safety and Security under Minister Charles Nqakula; Justice and Constitutional Development headed by new Minister Brigitte Mabandla; Intelligence with new Minister Ronnie Kasrils; and Correctional Services, led by new appointee Minister Ngconde Balfour.
Both Mabandla and Nqakula have big shoes to fill as their predecessors, Penuell Maduna and Steve Tshwete, were larger-than-life characters who talked big and presented a public image of a government in total control of the crime situation.
Kasrils’s role is to guard against security threats to the country through an early warning system designed to detect any hostile foreign or local entities organising in the country.
Ted Leggett, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, argues that the priorities and performance indicators of the line departments in the cluster are not coordinated.
”The police focus on arresting as many people as possible, justice focuses on clearing case backlogs and producing more convictions, while correctional services is unable to cope with the massive numbers of prisoners.
”There needs to be communication between the three departments about how many people can be taken in, how many prosecuted and how many prisons can actually cope with.
”The pressure of too many arrests is that the number of awaiting-trial prisoners increases, the prosecutors cannot cope, and the correctional system is unable to rehabilitate offenders. Lack of rehabilitation and preparation for community integration means many repeat offenders end up going back to jail, defeating the whole purpose,” he said.
Leggett says the massive numbers of arrests are a product of the national crime combating strategy, introduced after the change in political administrations in 1999.
”When Sydney Mufamadi was the safety minister there was a clear crime prevention programme that was funded and had people driving it. As far as I am concerned that strategy is dead.
”If you think you can lock up all the criminals, you are crazy. You have to deal with the factors that cause crime. South Africa already has one of the biggest prison populations in the world after the United States, Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. We are locking up huge numbers of criminals but the crime persists.”
While progress has been made in stabilising the level of certain crimes such as murder and rape, the cluster faces enormous challenges in reducing the overall crime level.
According to the cluster report, the hijacking of motor vehicles decreased by 20% during 2003/04, while bank robberies and cash-in-transit robberies decreased by 15%.
The report notes that ”the reduction of crime levels during the second phase [post-2003] will depend on the extent to which the causes of crime, many of which fall outside the ambit of the cluster are mitigated”.
These factors include rapid urbanisation, the changing demographics of South African society, the increasing number of households and rising levels of alcohol and drug abuse.
Leggett says the government will have to tackle the wide availability of firearms; landlords who abandon buildings that became havens for illegal immigrants, drug syndicates and prostitutes and to control the distribution of drugs and alcohol.
”Crime prevention does not need to be a long-term strategy, rooted in social conditions that the cluster cannot change. There are things that can be done to address the causes of crime today,” he said.
A research report for the South African Law Commission late last year made damning findings about how many South African criminals get away with their crimes.
The report found that for every 100 violent crimes such as murder, rape and aggravated robbery reported to the police, only six resulted in convictions.