Chairperson, it is my pleasure to present the Budget Vote speech of the Department of Correctional Services to this very important House. Our Minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, was looking forward to an opportunity to mark the beginning of our second year in office, but due to other commitments emanating from the vibrancy of this legislature, she could not be here today.
It is also an honour for me to introduce our new national commissioner, Mr Tom Moyane and the new chief financial officer, Mr Siphiwe Sokhela, who both assumed duty on 15 May 2010. Mr Moyane brings in a wealth of experience. [Applause.] Bacela niphakame. [They ask you to stand up.] [Applause.] That's our national commissioner, Mr Tom Moyane, and the new chief financial officer.
Mr Moyane brings in a wealth of experience in strategic leadership and management and in turning around ailing or struggling institutions. The chief financial officer's performance outcomes over the past 10 years in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature speak for themselves as they received an unqualified audit report for nine consecutive years. [Applause.]
Their appointment marks a turning point in the executive management instability that has plagued the Department of Correctional Services for some time now. We believe these great sons of our soil bring strategic and operational understanding as leaders and managers that will firmly place the department on a path to clean audit reports and a better image within the cluster.
An expression of appreciation goes to the Chairperson and members of the NCOP for their continued support. I know in your constituencies we often hear that you support our correctional services and that is greatly appreciated. I would like to acknowledge management and all the correctional officials who work tirelessly to deliver services to our people. I wish to express our warm gratitude to them for their guidance and support during our orientation. Allow me, Chairperson, to acknowledge all our officials, partners and our offenders present here today on my left. [Applause.]
My presentation of our five-year strategic plan to the House could not have come at a better time than after the signing of performance agreements between Ministers, in our case Minister Mapisa-Nqakula, and our President, Mr Jacob Zuma, the President of the Republic of South Africa.
The Minister and I are fully committed to ensuring that the Department of Correctional Services enhances its capabilities and contributes to our ultimate goal of ensuring that all people in South Africa are and feel safe, as my colleagues from the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development have said.
To realise this critical outcome of the whole criminal system, the Department of Correctional Services will make a contribution to the following service delivery outputs: improving effectiveness and integration of the criminal justice system; combating corruption within the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security cluster to enhance its effectiveness as a deterrent against crime; and managing perceptions of crime among the population.
In line with government's plan to make 2010-11 a year of action, the agreement spells out clear and measurable performance targets against which the performance of the Minister and, by inference, everyone else in the department, will be measured as we move forward.
As testimony that government is indeed geared to work differently and better, the performance targets have been graphically spelled out for each area and place emphasis on, among other things, the following: the improvement of numbers of offenders participating in and benefiting from formal and informal development care and corrections programmes; improving the efficiency of the remand detention system by reducing backlogs, years spent awaiting trial and increasing numbers of cases finalised each year; intensifying the detection processing of cases and increasing conviction rates of those perpetrating fraud and corruption within the system as a starting point in fighting the scourge in society as whole; ensuring that victims and the population receive accurate information on the state of crime and justice in order to build trust in the criminal justice system; and lastly, strengthening the collaboration and integration of the information technology system and efforts to combat cybercrime.
These targets will be pursued with vigour without neglecting the ongoing responsibilities of the Department of Correctional Services. The ongoing responsibilities on their own, directly or indirectly, contribute to ensuring a safe environment where people in South Africa will be free of the debilitating scourge of crime that renders them less productive. Promoting good governance is important for us. I'm happy to announce that in the previous financial year, 89% of 109 officials detected, investigated and put through disciplinary processes were found guilty and sanctioned. We attribute this to our formidable minimum anticorruption capacity built over the years to spearhead our zero tolerance of fraud and corruption.
We have already recovered R2,5 million of the expected R4,5 million from hundreds of officials in KwaZulu-Natal who defrauded the department's medical aid scheme. These officials signed acknowledgements of debt and I can say, without fear of contradiction, that we are indeed winning the war on corruption. We remain committed to improving on this level of performance by sharpening the implementation of mechanisms to prevent, detect and respond to fraud and corruption in the department.
We have also pledged to ensure heightened implementation of the White Paper on corrections which places rehabilitation of offenders at the heart of all our operations. When we presented our Budget Vote last year, we acknowledged and expressed our heartfelt gratitude to our predecessors, Minister Ngconde Balfour and Deputy Minister Loretta Jacobs. In the context of rehabilitation programmes for offenders, we committed ourselves to building on their foundation and to improve on whatever they have initiated.
From our national and international experience gained since our assumption of leadership of this department, we are beginning to formulate a clear vision for establishing a sustainable approach to offence-specific rehabilitation programmes. This approach carries with it hopes of a more profound change in offending behaviour of inmates and of reducing recidivism.
Addressing the National Assembly in March this year, we said we are facing a challenge of deep-seated social problems that we have to deal with today. These social problems fuel crime; they become a breeding ground for crime. It is against this understanding that we believe, more than ever before, that a more developmental and rehabilitation-centred approach is the best for the Department of Correctional Services.
Based on this understanding, we have committed ourselves to intervene in order to balance our investment in security and rehabilitation. To realise this we will, among other things, review and reduce our personnel expenditure from 69% of the allocated R15,1 billion to 63% within this term of government.
These adjustments are intended to create space for the reallocation of resources to strengthen rehabilitation and reduce recidivism. We will be periodically reporting on progress regarding increasing the number of offenders who are able to access both formal and informal development care and correction programmes. We will also prioritise vulnerable groups in order to ensure, among other things, that education and development of offenders' skills are made mandatory for school-going youth. We will begin by ensuring that those under the age of 15 years, who by law must be at school, do indeed study at our centres.
Those falling outside of these compulsory education provisions will be given incentives to ensure that they subject themselves to education and training in order to address absolute and functional illiteracy or a dearth of skills among offenders. They need to be prepared for productive and crime-free lives after release.
We will also pay particular attention to offenders who display symptoms of mental illness. During our visits to correctional centres, we came across disturbing cases of incarcerated offenders. We do not have the capacity to manage complex conditions like mental illness. We have invited experts from relevant fields to help us to address this challenge. We have also introduced a ministerial task team which is moving ahead to identify all these cases and advise us accordingly.
We will also give appropriate attention to creating an enabling environment for the promotion of human dignity for women, children, people living with disabilities and elderly offenders, even though they constitute a small number. As part of a bigger campaign in this regard, we have now launched the Imbeleko Project across all regions, which is aimed at ensuring an appropriate environment for incarcerated mothers with babies, while intensifying the alternative placement of children who have exceeded the legal threshold of two years.
We will also support the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services to ensure the conscious protection of human rights of offenders, as that is the mandate of the independent judge who oversees our correctional centres.
The role of the Inspecting Judge was fortified on 1 October 2009 when sections 60 to 67 of the Correctional Services Amendment Act of 2008 were put into operation by proclamation in the Government Gazette.
On the question of managing perceptions of crime, perceptions can be everything to the beholder. Currently, the department is receiving more than its fair share of negative publicity and perceptions, some of which are a product of sheer ignorance. We've committed ourselves to stepping up efforts to provide the public and the media with the accurate information they require to effectively participate in the transformation of the correctional system and in improving delivery of services.
To advance this cause, we will review the corrections contact centre launched in July 2009 to serve internal public for purposes of ensuring a caring, responsive and accessible correctional system for the public and all stakeholders.
Another critical platform for people's engagement in corrections is the parole system. We have advertised positions of chairpersons of 52 correctional supervision and parole boards and the due date is Friday this week. I will encourage all the members to invite community members to apply so that they can help us in the release of our offenders.
The new chairpersons are expected to assume duties in July 2010, replacing the first group whose five-year contracts end in June 2010. We will pull out all the stops to maximise victim participation in the administration of parole, in particular, and in correctional services delivery in general. We trust that these engagements will help in building public trust and confidence in our correctional system.
As earlier alluded to, there are a number of other standing responsibilities which the department commits to deliver on. These standing responsibilities include overcrowding; security enhancement; optimisation of offender labour; stakeholder mobilisation; and strengthening of monitoring, evaluation and reporting, particularly against the indicators outlined in our strategic plan.
With regard to offender population management, a multipronged strategy of addressing the perennial challenge of overcrowding is being pursued. This strategy incorporates the audit of inmates in order to use various legal provisions to down-manage overcrowding and the construction and rationalisation of facilities, as well as the establishment of dedicated branches for managing remand detainees.
The Minister has appointed a special task team to audit various categories of inmates for purposes of determining those deserving consideration for parole, reclassification, bail protocol and conversion of custodial sentences into correctional or community supervision. This task team has now covered two regions, namely the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape.
The Kimberley Correctional Centre has been completed. Over 2 000 offenders have been transferred to the facility as part of a phased population of the centre that can take up to 3 000 offenders. Progress is being made to establish a dedicated remand detention branch with additional support systems being rolled out like, for example, the video remand court system and the introduction of the automated personal identification system, which is in place in 14 correctional centres.
We are still on course in our procurement of public-private partnership facilities as well as the revamping and renovation of a number of existing facilities that together are expected to deliver more than 20 000 additional bed spaces by 2014. We have engaged the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, CSIR, for the purposes of auditing our facilities as part of rationalising and optimising our deployment of physical, financial and human resources.
Although we are progressively succeeding in reducing escapes - we achieved the lowest record of 40 escapes in 2009 - we view one more escape, particularly from a maximum facility, as one too many. Our target is to reduce escapes by a further 31% by 2015, by way of strengthening security structures, emergency security teams and dealing decisively with corrupt elements colluding to enable escapes.
With regard to offender labour, we continue to mobilise resources, both in private and in public, so as to ensure that each and every offender has an opportunity to acquire skills and expertise through productive work in preparation for their integration into society on release.
In terms of building institutional capacity to deliver better, one of the most strategic resources is our personnel. They carry our hopes and aspirations for an effective correctional system. We will continue to improve implementation of various occupational-specific Dispensations, OSDs, applicable in correctional services, heighten the roll-out of the seven-day establishment, while also going ahead to fill critical vacancies, in particular with regard to scarce skills this year.
We want to assure the House and the public that the Department of Correctional Services will manage to deliver on the target set for the financial year within the allocated budget of R15,1 billion, projected to grow at an annual rate of 9,7% over the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, MTEF, period. As demonstrated by the stringent management of the budget for the previous financial year, we will again not overspend on our allocation.
In conclusion, I can confidently state that we are poised to accelerate the transformation of the Department of Correctional Services and improve service delivery. We have geared ourselves to enhance the integration of the work of our partners within government and all other stakeholders to ensure that all people in South Africa are and feel safe. Thank you. [Applause.]