Chairperson, Minister and colleagues, the Department of Correctional Services occupies an unenviable, but crucially necessary part in the criminal justice system.
The department is obliged to admit, house, clothe, feed, rehabilitate and reintegrate offenders referred to them by the courts. These offenders are frequently very violent and manipulative. Many offenders are extremely rich and have criminal contacts outside the prison. Therefore, the work that the ordinary officials perform, particularly in the sections and at the centres, is frequently very dangerous. We would like to extend our thanks and appreciation to them for the dedicated work that they do. Many of them are here today, and many others are watching.
The fact is, however, that unless offenders are corrected and rehabilitated, we will not make South Africa a safer place to live in. But the sorry reality is that most offenders are not rehabilitated. In fact, many offenders emerge more criminalised than when they were admitted. This is largely because most prisons are overcrowded and understaffed.
Many prisons or parts of prisons are controlled by gangs for long periods of the day. Most offenders do not get the rehabilitative interventions they need, or do not get them in sufficient intensity. Most offenders do not learn skills or the habits of hard work when they are in prison.
Speaking of gangs, it is a damning reflection on the extent of gang control in our prisons that an advertising agency can use this as part of a campaign against drunken driving. Are we so completely complacent about the fact that gangs control prison life, that abuse of inmates is an accepted part of the punishment?
There is a way to break this cycle, but it requires imagination and bold leadership. It starts with the institution of a system of alternative sentences, so that not every offender lands up in prison where he or she can be criminalised by gangs. It involves having an inmate tracking system, so that more parolees and probationers can be released without the risk of them absconding. It involves prisons that are less crowded and designed with rehabilitation in mind. It requires dedicated and incorruptible staff who understand what is needed and have the skills to rehabilitate offenders. It is based on the understanding that prisons work where prisoners work and prisons are self-sufficient. The department needs to ensure that the resources of the budget flow to these priorities.
Unfortunately, not much progress has been made towards these goals. While the Criminal Procedure Act provides for alternative sentences, these are not used nearly as widely as they could be. Specifically, many more offenders who do not constitute a danger to society need to do community service instead of serving prison time. This will relieve the pressure on overcrowding, but it requires the social reintegration branch to be properly resourced. This programme only receives 3,5% of the Department of Correctional Service's budget, far too little for magistrates to feel confident that those performing community service will be properly monitored and supervised.
Likewise, progress towards the rolling out of the inmate tracking devices has been painfully slow, and we hope that the Minister's expensive visit to New York last year will provide new impetus to this project. The portfolio committee was told that Cabinet had to block start-up funding to the electronic monitoring project. The Minister needs to explain to Cabinet that it is much cheaper to monitor a parolee or probationer in the community than it is to imprison that person. I was delighted to hear that the Minister is also going to explore the possibility of prison transfer agreements. But I recently asked her colleague, the Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, whether or not South Africa was, in fact, going to negotiate any such agreements. The Minister's colleague replied as follows, "No, government will not enter into any prison transfer agreements." I think it is important for us to get clarity on that.
The progress towards the construction of new generation prisons has been equally slow. The department's reluctance to go ahead with the public- private partnership, PPP, prisons has been attributed to concerns about cost escalations, as the hon chairperson explained a minute ago, but what is inexplicable is the delay in the completion of the facilities the department is constructing itself.
A very good example is the prison in Vanrhynsdorp, the completion of which is two years overdue. Sections of this prison had to be broken down and reconstructed when the plans where found to be deficient. I understand that there were at least 13 variations of these plans. For example, there were single cells for women, constructed without toilet facilities. The manganese-enriched steel for the window bars was substandard.
The changes to the plans of this prison, many of which might have been avoided with foresight and proper planning, have not only involved delays, but have also involved wasted expenditure running to many millions of rands. I believe that R10 million, that was not anticipated, was spent in excavation works of that prison alone.
Whatever the disadvantages of the PPP prisons may be, and I suspect much of the opposition is misinformed and ideological, they were at least finished on time and within the budget. I welcome the ongoing debate on that topic.
Then there is the issue of the recruitment and retention of staff. More than 100 members of the department's staff leave the service every month. Over and above this, there is a large number of vacancies, especially of skilled artisans, educators and health professionals. There are still too many officials working in administrative and managerial posts and not enough at the coalface in respect of rehabilitating offenders.
Because of the shortage of the right kinds of staff, offenders are not productive for long enough. Very little in the line of rehabilitative programmes is provided for those who serve sentences of less than 24 months. While those with longer sentences are supposed to have an offender rehabilitation plan, these plans are frequently not adhered to because of a shortage of professional or educational staff or the seven-day establishment, which obliges correctional intervention officers to take time off.
There is no way that we are going to achieve these goals, unless we involve the private sector and the nongovernmental organisations, NGO, sector. We need to have a partnership on this and we need to make it possible for the private sector and NGOs to become part of the solution.
However, nothing should stop offenders from working. There are correctional centres that have production workshops that don't produce anything. There are farms that stand fallow. The portfolio committee was told that there is not enough custodial staff to allow the farms to be utilised optimally. The portfolio committee was also told that the expansion of broiler projects was approved at four correctional centres, but these plans were rejected by the department's National Building Advisory Committee. Bakeries in seven correctional centres are the subject of feasibility studies. Too little too late, we say.
Offenders should be active and productive for a minimum of eight hours a day because this takes them out of the cells, out of the sections and away from the gangs and start putting back into society what those offenders have taken from society by virtue of their crimes. If there is not enough work for them in the prisons, they can always fill potholes or clear up the rubbish in the City of Johannesburg and other ANC-controlled municipalities. [Interjections.] There are no potholes in Cape Town.
Most disturbingly, the budget that we are asked to approve, once more, does not reflect and underscore the orientation of rehabilitation of offenders, the point that the chairperson made. Once more, the security and administration programmes absorb the lion's share of the budget. Again, the development, care and social reintegration programmes receive a scant 17,5% of the budget. We have to ask these very serious questions: Is the department serious about the vision of the White Paper? Is the department serious about correcting offending behaviour and rehabilitating offenders? I regret that there is nothing that we heard in the budget presentation or in what the Minister has told us today that has convinced us that they are. Unless there is the genuine transformation that the Minister was referring to, the department will simply admit increasing numbers of criminals reoffending. [Time expired.]