Deputy
Chairperson, yes, the Department of Correctional Services has measures to control overcrowding in the correctional facilities. The Department of Correctional Services, DCS, follows a multipronged strategy consisting of the following dimensions: Overcrowding as a global phenomenon that undermines all efforts by any correctional system; to render effective security and rehabilitation and; effectively changing behaviour of sentenced persons. In terms of its legal mandate, the primary responsibility of the DCS is enforcing sentences of the court's orders through a warrant of detention or committal. The Department of Correctional Services has no legal powers to refuse detention of inmates on the basis of inadequate bed space and other factors resulting in overcrowding of inmates. The DCS follows a multipronged strategy consisting of the following dimensions: Managing levels of remand detainees through the integrated justice system, Case Management Task Team and Intersectoral Committee on Child Justice; managing levels of sentenced offenders through improving effective and appropriate use of conversion of a sentence to correctional supervision; release on parole and transfers between correctional centres to attempt to establish some degree of evenness of overcrowding; ensuring progress with DCS capital works programme to upgrade correctional facilities
as well as to build new correctional centres that are both cost- effective and rehabilitation orientated.
The upgraded C-Max Correctional Centre in Pretoria was practically completed in December 2018, and will be officially opened very soon. This facility will increase. It has about 284 beds. Standerton and Estcourt Correctional Centres were officially opened in April and May 2019 respectively. The two centres combined provide 1998 bed spaces. We are now waiting for the official handover of the Tzaneen Correctional Centre from the contractor and when combined with the refurbished Glencoe Correctional Centre, these will provide 1101 beds by the end of this financial year.
Encouraging debate in South Africa about the reason for incarceration as a sentence and encouraging approach to appropriate sentencing that is focused on facilitating rehabilitation; enhancing community correctional supervision so that it can be better utilised as an appropriate sentence for less serious crimes; improving correction and development programmes with DCS to ensure the enhanced facilitation of rehabilitation that targets offending behaviour; encouraging improvement of first and second levels of corrections in families for social institutions, social and economic sector government departments respectively to decrease the rate of
entry into the criminal justice system; and encouraging community involvement in social reintegration of offenders back into their communities in order to assist in reducing levels of repeat offending. This multipronged strategy has enabled the department to have some kind of management of the overcrowding situation. Thank you.