Overcrowding in South Africa’s prisons, administered by the Department of Correctional Services (DCS), is well-documented with plans in place to either extend existing ones and add new ones, a Parliamentary questioner was told.

DCS is the government department responsible for operating and managing the country’s 240 prisons which house 157 000 plus inmates.

Eleven new correctional centres (CCs) are on Minister Pieter Groenewald’s list to alleviate overcrowding he told Virgill Gericke, an EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) National Council of Provinces (NCOP) Member of Parliament (MP). They are Burgersdorp (500 beds), Kirkwood (500 beds), Parys (290 beds), Lichtenburg (500 beds), Thohoyandou (500 beds), Zeerust (500 beds), Nigel (1 500 beds), Leeuwkop (1 500 beds), George (500 beds), Voorberg (100 beds) and Richards Bay (1 000 beds).

When complete the eleven new correctional centres will have accommodation, termed “beds”, for 7 390 prisoners.

With the exception of Nigel, Kirkwood and Thohoyandou, where planning and design are underway, all other CCs are either at site clearance, handed to contractor or underway, with Parys named as being 65% complete. Groenewald did not give his questioner any indication of when the added accommodation will be ready for use.

The additional facilities form part of a DCS overcrowding reduction strategy. It was approved in March 2021 and includes direct and indirect measures to reduce and manage the South African prison population.

One measure was the amnesty/special remission of sentence announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in August 2023 coinciding with his predecessor starting sentence in the Estcourt Correctional Centre. This saw 16 742 offenders released with the bulk of them – 14 013 – unconditional. Another was 703 “lifers granted parole in the 2023/24 financial year.”

Between April and June 2023, 785 offenders were transferred between regions for even distribution of the offender population.