Two inmate deaths at Pollsmoor last week highlight severe mismanagement and operational failure as prisons remain overcrowded, with budgets wasted and funds misappropriated. An urgent national spending review is needed to restore safety and accountability, the Democratic Alliance (DA) believes.
Janho Engelbrecht, DA Spokesperson on Correctional Services, said the two inmate deaths at Pollsmoor Correctional Centre “are a tragic yet predictable consequence of a facility and a regional management structure in complete crisis.”
“Our correctional facilities are severely overcrowded, with almost 60,000 remand detainees, and they are financially crippled by terrible budget planning, inflated unfit-for-purpose contracts, and misappropriated funds,” Engelbrecht said.
The DA therefore calls for a full scale, national spending review across the entire Correctional Service Department. The DA will write to Minister Dr Pieter Groenewald to ask him for the full spending review to take place without delay.
The review must account for the spending that is taking place to house tens of thousands of remand detainees, who are not yet convicted of crimes, because the Department of Justice has lost the capacity to speedily handle criminal trials, Engelbrecht continued.
“The incident at Pollsmoor thrusts it back into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, mere weeks after the facility was embroiled in the scandal of two erroneous releases.”
This is not an isolated incident, the DA said. “It forms a devastating pattern of failure across the Western Cape Region, coming hot on the heels of similar events at the Oudtshoorn facility. The management at Pollsmoor, the Area and the Regional level have proven themselves to be fundamentally incapable of ensuring basic safety, security, and order. The DA will not stand by while this vital institution crumbles. South Africa cannot have a Correctional Service that allows inmates to be killed, or to escape, on a regular basis.”
The DA has also submitted urgent parliamentary questions to Groenewald, demanding a full and transparent account of the circumstances that led to these two deaths at Pollsmoor.
“We will intensify our oversight visits and use every parliamentary mechanism at our disposal to hold the executive and the department’s failing management to account. The blood of these inmates is on the hands of a negligent management structure and a national department that has abandoned its duty to protect both its citizens and those in its care,” Engelbrecht said.
The budget available to the Department of Correctional Services must be fully reviewed, without delay, so that all waste and all misappropriation can be immediately stopped, to spend on the fundamentals of safer and more secure prisons, Engelbrecht concluded.
