It’s the usual Women’s Day fare. The harmonising voices from the choir inside the plastic white tent invoke a former struggle song about “women going to Parliament”.
The audience of 1 000 people celebrating South Africa’s Women’s Day erupt into ululating, singing and dancing. They clap and whistle, dance around the tent and wave their hands in the air.
They could be any group of ordinary South Africans. Only the name of the choir of women in make-up, high-heels and matching outfits offers a clue to who they are: the Johannesburg Female Offenders’ choir.
Cynthia Myeni is one of the choir members. She talks animatedly about her children and her studies towards a diploma in church ministry.
Myeni lives in Johannesburg Prison, also known as Sun City. But far from resembling its namesake, as another prisoner puts it, “it’s a prison … not a hotel.”
The 34-year-old mother’s story began when she was unemployed. Myeni, who holds a degree in library sciences, told her daughter that she had a new job opportunity — a chance to make money and help the two of them pay their bills.
Her 16-year-old child was not unhappy when she heard her mother had to travel, because it meant her mother would be able to make ends meet. It was just a trip to Brazil and back, after all. She wouldn’t be away long.
However, Myeni still hasn’t come home 18 months later. When she arrived at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport in December 2009, she was taken to a nearby hospital and X-Rayed and found to be carrying 675g of cocaine. It was her first attempt at drug trafficking. She was sentenced to prison for nine years and will serve another three before she is eligible for parole.
Myeni sees her 10-year-old son and her daughter, now 18, about six times a year. They bring money for tea and coffee, and “some white bread”, she adds with a smile. The prisoners eat brown bread every morning and evening.
The food in prison is not good, she says wryly. “And it’s cold inside.”
Nevertheless, Myeni talks about her 39 cellmates as if they were her family. She says they learn each other’s languages and racial tension hardly exists. “White people speak Zulu”, she says, proud of the multicultural aspect of life behind bars.
Her day is short. She wakes up at 5am and is locked back inside the cell at 2pm. But she studies in the library during the day when she is not singing in the choir, which is practising for inter-prison competitions.
Learning skills and keeping busy is what Gauteng’s acting regional commissioner for the department of correctional services, Jenny Schreiner, suggests prisoners do.
During the Women’s Day Celebrations at the Johannesburg Prison, Schreiner stands on stage in her official khaki uniform with her grey hair in a bun, and urges prisoners to make use of the training programmes available to them behind prison walls. “There is lots more we need to offer prisoners,” she admits, “but it’s better than when I was in prison”.
In 1986 Schreiner went to Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. She speaks with no shame about her years behind bars and only mentions that she was incarcerated as a political prisoner when asked about her story.
Schreiner shared a cell with white cellmates who had been jailed for crime. It was the eighties, and she was separated from her fellow political prisoners because they were black.
One thing she had realised by the time she was paroled in 1990 was that if South Africa didn’t sort out its prison system, “society would be in for a lot of trouble”. Schreiner says prison systems harden people, who leave the prisons dysfunctional and unable to contribute to society. She wants that to change.
“If we don’t enable women to break the cycle of crime and support their families, ultimately they come back into our facilities”.
“We need to allow people who genuinely want to change a second chance,” she says.
Schreiner is determined that women in prison should be rehabilitated. They learn how to cook and work as chefs or caterers, or they learn dressmaking and are given the opportunity to finish their schooling or complete tertiary studies.
But leaving prison is not easy. One former prisoner, who asks to remain anonymous, says she was released from Johannesburg Prison six years ago and has been unemployed since. Her criminal record is an impediment to finding work. She remarried after prison and her husband supports her four children.
It’s like a stuck record
“I’ve got my life to live. I’ve paid enough but people don’t believe in us,” adds another prisoner, who spent 13 years in prison for robbery. In 2010, a year after leaving jail, she was fired from her first job after two weeks when they discovered she had a criminal record.
But she has spent the past few months in another job after being employed by a family friend, and at night she teachers adult literacy classes.
A total of 44 women prisoners are up for parole in August, seven of whom live in Gauteng.
But it’s difficult leaving, warn the former prisoners. “A criminal record is like a black cloud [hanging over us],” says one former prisoner, who believes that she was only able to find a job “because of the grace of God”. She has stayed in that same job for five years, but adds that she was also honest about the time she had spent in jail when she applied for work.
Deputy Minister of Correctional Services Ngoako Ramatlhodi says the stigma of being a prisoner forces convicts back into jail. “It’s a big obstacle, the stigma on former inmates. When they apply for jobs they have to answer, ‘Have you ever been convicted?'”
“As we appeal to communities to accept inmates, we can’t ask communities to do one thing and government to do another”. Ramatlhodi says that Parliament should look at whether prisoners need to disclose their criminal record when they apply for work.
He says that at some point, former convicts’ records should stop hanging like a shadow over their lives. Schreiner asks if many of us would make different choices if we lived the lives that many prisoners do.
Shanté Adams defrauded the bank she worked at for 16 years. “I mis-used my position”, she says. “I was beaten by my husband. He used to knock me on the head. I used to carry mace but he would turn it back on me.”
She says it has hurt that she has “been a mother from a distance”. She wasn’t there for her children’s high school years. She says she feels as though she placed a burden on her three children, whome she seldom sees after spending more than four years in jail. “They needed a mother and I wasn’t there.”
Adams will be eligible for parole in October. She has 16 years of work experience, has learnt drama and business skills in prison and learned new languages during her time in the cells.
But she is “nervous” about leaving. She has a criminal record and jobs will be difficult to find. In answer to a question on how she will manage, she says: “I will take one day at a time.”