It seems quite mild as you approach — just a long wire fence with an innocuous sign that says something about correctional services Boksburg.
We’re way out in the veld in the middle of fast-growing suburbia, wondering why people would live here. But they do — signs of normality, schoolboys slouching down the roads in their green and grey uniforms in the middle of the morning, either playing hookey or sent home for bad behaviour.
And then, talking about bad behaviour, you come to the prison gates. The keeper of the gate is a friendly black man in a chocolate brown uniform who lets you through with surprising ease. We hang out in the VIP complex, with its tuckshop, cafeteria, and offices staffed mostly by black ladies, also tucked into those chocolate brown uniforms. Everyone seems laid back and friendly. An Afrikaner officer who has been walking around in earnest conversation with his black counterpart pulls out a bunch of keys to open up the VIP lounge for us, not wanting us to be hanging around in the cold while we wait for our hosts to pick us up and take us into the main prison area. The keys drop out of his hands in the courtyard after he has opened up, and he casually bends to pick them up.
“That looks like a cue for someone to rush up and get hold of all the keys to the prison and stage a getaway,” I quip.
He looks me straight in the eye.
“Then I would just kick him as he tried to get them. He wouldn’t get very far.” And he breaks into a smile.
It’s a far cry from the grim atmosphere of Number Four at the Johannesburg Fort in the bad old days, and Pollsmoor and Leeukop, which I visited on a couple of occasions in the 1990s, and which made my hair stand on end, and a chill run down my spine, wondering if, even as a non-convict, I would ever get out of there. Violent warders and sullen prisoners, looking for any opportunity to break out, knock out another victim, slit someone’s guts, or just act plain mean, in the roles they had been cast in for life.
Boksburg was an eye opener. I told our host, one of the prison officers, that this looked like a relatively new style of prison. He told me that it was better than the other ones, but was already getting kind of old-fashioned. There was still a long way to go in this business of handling recalcitrants, thugs and desperadoes.
You look around and wonder what he is talking about. There are a few white prisoners among the mainly black prison population. Everyone walks around in rather funky looking orange pyjamas with correctional services logos tastefully stamped all over them.
You go clanking through the security gates that take you into the main jail, are carefully checked for firearms and other lethal weapons, and have to surrender your cellphone (and you forget what a privation that can be, even for a few hours). And then into the main prison area, wondering what it’s going to be like.
All the prisoners, black, white and blue, walk with an optimistic spring in their step, self-confident tsotsis to a man. They stop and chat with each other, and generally seem to be unsupervised. It looks like they can choose their own footwear — most in tackies, but some choosing to wear uncomfortable looking patent leather shoes with block heels, probably bought at PEP stores in neighbouring Benoni or Germiston and brought in during visiting hours by sympathetic relatives.
There is, indeed, that sour smell of prison lingering in all the corridors, a mixture of stale sweat, urine and detergent, cigarettes and old food. But out in the exercise yard the prisoners are all hanging around in groups chatting with each other and doing nothing much at all in the winter sun. They stare with casual interest at these newcomers in civvies, and leer at the lone young woman who is part of our party, reminding you that these are, after all, men deprived of contact with the opposite sex for a number of years, and anyway feel that they have nothing more to lose; some of whom, in fact, might have even been convicted of sexual offences in the first place.
There are tattoos here and there, and a few guys with their two top middle teeth punched out, all signs of membership of various prison societies, or simply signs of regular vendettas behind the locked iron doors after lights out. Nobody seems to be particularly bothered. Apart from the shoes, appearance is not a priority in this environment.
I am a little surprised that most of them are wearing smart leather belts. I thought belts and shoelaces were potentially lethal instruments — either to hang yourself before the judge can hang you, or to strangle another man that all prisoners were deprived of on arrival. But you live and learn.
On this visit we learn that part of the increasingly enlightened prison policy, in this facility at least, is that prisoners are no longer even referred to as prisoners. They are “correctional clients”. And the administrative style of the place makes this seem like more than fancy language. There are educational opportunities and recreational possibilities on offer, and correctional clients, presumably the ones on good behaviour, get to run errands beyond the high walls of the main jail, interracting almost like equals with the office workers in the VIP section. All very laid back.
So all in all: further signs of progress in the South Africa we have inherited since the dark days of Number Four and Robben Island.
Although you do wonder, looking in the eyes of some of those seemingly well-meaning inmates, what they would be like if you met them in a dark street one cold and silent night. One fights to stop oneself getting carried away with unreasonable romanticism.