SA prison spend misdirected: Inspectorate

That`s the view of the director of the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services, Gideon Morris.

The Star newspaper adds he last week told the National Assembly’s correctional services committee that the department was spending billions of rands to reduce the number of escapes, but that the escape rate was not high enough to justify this.

“The continued investment in perimeter fencing and external security measures are becoming wasteful,” Morris said. “We must rather start… channelling this money into development, rehabilitation and social reintegration of the inmates.”

Morris said he was concerned that the department’s spending on its core job – rehabilitation – had declined from 4.5% of its budget in the 2004/05 financial year to 3.39% in the present financial year. It would decrease to 2.76% in 2011/12.

The amounts budgeted for reintegrating convicts into society was also down, but spending on security had increased slightly from 33.34% in 2004/05 to 33.43% this year.

Spending on infrastructure – which included building four new prisons – was to double from 13.27% this year to 26.04% in 2011/12, The Star added.

Chandré Gould, of the Institute for Security Studies, said taxpayers were to fork out about R10.8-billion – more than the cost of building and upgrading stadiums for the World Cup – to create 16 711 prison beds, most of which would be in private prisons. This meant each bed space would cost R653 800.

Gould said this was “an extremely high cost” to pay for tackling a problem that could be more cheaply dealt with by implementing policies to ease overcrowding.

Lukas Muntingh, of the Civil Society Prison Reform Initiative, called for plans to build the privately run prisons – and the costly 25-year maintenance plans into which the government would be locked – to be reconsidered in the light of the economic crisis.

Not only would the cost of building and running the prisons put extra demands on burdened taxpayers, but “it may also take away funds from government initiatives (like job creation) that might have prevented crime in the first instance”, Muntingh said.