Increased interaction of warders with prisoners is important in pre-empting gang attacks and other gang-related activity in prisons, a study released on Monday reveals.
”Engagement with prisoners is a vital method of counteracting gang activity. In doing so the warders are able to know what’s happening with the prisoners and when a hit is going down,” said the University of the Western Cape’s economic and management sciences dean, Chris Tapscott, who conducted the study, Best Practice in Prison Governance, at public and privately run prisons in South Africa.
Tapscott’s study found the more contact warders have with prisoners on a daily basis, the more chance they have of exerting a positive influence on them and the greater possibility the warders have of diverting inmates from gang life.
Prison officials stated that recognising vulnerable inmates and separating them from gangs who tend to prey on them is important in the early stages of an inmate’s term in prison.
”This doesn’t always work, but has been effective in some areas,” said Tapscott.
Private prisons
He said private prisons seem to have an effective strategy of decreasing gang activity by having a strictly regimented eight-hour day for prisoners.
In two of the private prisons he observed, gang activity was further decreased by the lack of cash being made available to prisoners and the fact that there were only two inmates per cell. He said this limited the possibilities for gang organisation after lock-up times.
”What I found is that gang members want to be transferred from these private prisons because there is very little opportunity for them to carry out their gang activities there,” Tapscott said.
It was reported that ”hardcore” gang members found the highly regulated form of life in those prisons to be disempowering.
Tapscott said he found all the prisons he visited had some form of adult basic education and school-level training for prisoners.
”There were problems of access to teachers and materials, but the fact that educational programmes were available at all prisons is something positive in itself.”
Although there were television sets at every prison he visited, Tapscott said prisoners had access to information about the outside world mainly through daily newspapers.
”The television they were watching was limited to sport and skop, skiet en donner [kick, shoot and hit] programmes oriented to the lowest common denominator.”
Prison issues
The Department of Correctional Services is looking at issues such as staffing levels and the provision of equipment at a representative 36 prisons around the country in order to form a better picture of the nationwide situation, said the department’s deputy commissioner of policy coordination, Mary Mokgoro.
Mokgoro said gang-related activity in prisons will be addressed in the department’s 2006/2011 strategy. In the meantime, staff numbers are being increased.
”We plan to appoint 8 000 additional staff over the next three years. About 3 000 have already been appointed since March this year,” she said.
Mokgoro agreed that overcrowding in prisons is a problem and said other sentencing options besides imprisonment are being investigated.
She said the department is working with the Treasury and Department of Public Service and Administration on ”career-pathing” measures, aimed at recruiting, training and retaining staff in the department.
These include increasing salaries for IT staff, social workers and psychologists.
Mokgoro said there are also efforts to transform the job of a prison warder into a career by introducing salary increases, professional bodies and career-specific training.
”In other countries, corrections is a profession … we are moving towards that,” she said. — Sapa