/ 8 June 2005

School behind bars

If you asked someone to list 10 words they associate with South Africa, "crime" would almost certainly be among them. With 35 000 young people under the age of 21 currently awaiting trial or sentenced and imprisoned, it would seem that lawlessness is going to be a defining feature of South Africa for a long time to come.

If you asked someone to list 10 words they associate with South Africa, ‘crime” would almost certainly be among them. With 35 000 young people under the age of 21 currently awaiting trial or sentenced and imprisoned, it would seem that lawlessness is going to be a defining feature of South Africa for a long time to come.

A major reason for this, argues Judy Connors, is another word often associated with South Africa: poverty. Connors is director of the Phamphama Initiative, an NGO involved in alternative-to-violence training that works with youngsters under the age of 18 who have been arrested but are still awaiting trial.

In her experience, many of these youngsters are repeat offenders and ‘deliberately do crime again so they have a meal and a place to stay”.

Llewellyn Visagie is a child- and youth-care worker at the department of social services and welfare development in Upington in the Northern Cape. He works with young offenders charged with crimes ranging from murder and rape to housebreaking. Most of them are sent to Marcus Mbete Secure School until their trials have been completed.

In his view, ‘Poverty is an indirect reason for the youth turning to crime. But it’s also because there’s no after-school programmes, and often they are home alone. Children are also growing up just with their grannies and mums, who find it hard to discipline them.”

The secure school can accommodate 40 children (younger than 18 years), providing both hostel and schooling facilities. Once charged with a crime, the child will remain there until sentencing — which, in theory, should happen within 14 days.

But as principal David Klaasens knows from long experience, the time between arrest and sentencing can stretch on into weeks, months and sometimes as long as two years.

‘The justice system is so unpredictable,” he says. ‘They don’t have a timeframe that they stick to. Today we’ll get one child who’s arrested for shoplifting and another for stealing a bunch of grapes, and the one will just sit and wait while the other’s case goes through much quicker. The stress builds up in the child who’s waiting. I don’t understand it.”

Children found guilty are transferred to another facility, while those found not guilty are returned to their families.

The fact that the school’s learner body is always changing means that Klaasens and his three teachers have to adopt a flexible approach.

The children are grouped in classes according to age and offered a range of subjects, with a particular emphasis on skills training (such as welding and woodwork).

For Klaasens, the real reward is returning children to their communities. ‘I make sure that they are easily reaccepted into their old schools because I personally work with the principals.”

While some of the children prove to be repeat offenders, Klaasens’s estimates that 80% of the children are successfully reintegrated into free society.

But he also recognises how broader social problems such as unemployment, broken families and alcohol abuse leave children vulnerable in all sorts of ways — including being exposed to crime and becoming career criminals. But in Klaasens’ view, ‘90% of the reason children do crime is because of drugs”.