Chairperson, hon Minister, Deputy Minister and colleagues, I would like to start by paying tribute to the many thousands of dedicated men and women who staff the department. Theirs is not a very glamorous job. It is frequently dangerous and does not pay very well, yet it is one of those jobs that have to be done. Most do it professionally and with dedication. These people strive against huge odds to make a difference, to rehabilitate offenders and to minimise the reoffending rate. To these people we say: Thank you for what you do to reduce crime in South Africa.
There are, however, other officials who do not maintain these standards, who are corrupt, who are in league with the gangsters and who abuse their position of power. These officials take bribes and smuggle drugs into the prisons, they allow the gangs to conduct their illegal activities in prisons, they abuse sick leave and they sleep on duty. We cannot express strongly enough our disgust at the conduct of these officials.
I say this because the Department of Correctional Services plays an absolutely central role in the fight against crime. If the men and women who staff that department fail to correct offending behaviour and fail to rehabilitate offenders, we will simply release back into society people who have become more criminalised as a result of their imprisonment. They will be graduates, if you like - as the chairperson said - of the university of real crime. In these circumstances, crime will simply get more widespread and more violent.
So the question is: Is the department helping to win the war against crime? Or are our prisons merely, and I quote the title of a book, "An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse"? In 2005, as the Minister mentioned, the Cabinet approved the White Paper on Corrections. This was, and still is, a very far-sighted document. It properly places rehabilitation and reintegration at the centre of the business of corrections, and boldly moves away from the idea that imprisonment consists of simply warehousing attendees and releasing them back into society so that they can offend again.
The White Paper demanded of the department that it changes its attitudes, reorientates its activities and reprioritises its expenditure. But has the White Paper actually been implemented, five years since its acceptance? In theory, yes. Every presentation we get from the department pays lip service to the White Paper, but in practice very few of its central principles have been implemented.
For example, central to the White Paper is a tailor-made sentence plan for every offender. That makes a lot of sense. The reality is, however, that this applies only to sentenced offenders serving two years or more. There are no offender rehabilitation plans for offenders with sentences of less than two years, which includes the majority of young, first-time and nonviolent offenders. This, counter-intuitively, means that the people with the best chance of rehabilitation are effectively denied that chance.
But worse, only 8 400, or 8,3%, of the 101 370 offenders serving sentences of more than two years have sentence plans at all.
Moreover, only some 2 700 offenders are in literacy programmes, and the department admits - the Minister referred to it earlier, commendably - that it does not have the human resources or infrastructure to support the requirements of full-time tuition. This is actually written in code. What it means is that most young offenders are not getting educated.
The department also proudly announces that 116 115 offenders participated in social work sessions. But what does this actually mean? Does it mean once a year, once a month, once a week, or a couple of times just before release? And despite section 40 of the Act, which obliges offenders to work, only a handful of offenders are in productive employment.
The best illustration of the lot of how little things have fundamentally changed is in the percentage of the budget that is allocated to the various programmes within this Vote. In the 2005-06 financial year when the White Paper was approved, security and corrections - that is, the warehousing part of the budget - consumed 43,45% of the budget. This year, they consume 44,46% of the budget. In other words, it has gone slightly up. In 2005-06, development and reintegration, which is the rehabilitative part of the budget, got 8,02% of the budget. This year the programmes get 7,28% of the budget. In other words, it has gone slightly down. So, despite the fact that the White Paper calls for a radical reorientation, placing rehabilitation at the centre of all the activities, the department carries on with business as usual and regardless.
Not properly resourcing development means that offenders emerge from sentences without the skills to look after themselves. The Minister correctly referred to that. Small wonder, then, that so many of them reoffend because they don't have the skills to look after themselves. Not properly resourcing reintegration means that too few offenders are released on parole, and that the judiciary has too little faith in alternative noncustodial sentences, which should really form the basis of the resolution of the problem of overcrowding. The result is that prisons become overcrowded with offenders serving relatively short sentences, who then become serious criminals as a result of their stay in prison.
If the Department of Correctional Services wants to make a difference in the fight against crime, it needs to make a huge shift in emphasis. We have made this point before, in the committee and year after year in these debates. The committee has consensus on this. But it seems that the department is not listening.
Instead, the department builds a facility in Kimberley that was completed 18 months late and which virtually doubled in price, a facility that commissioned contractors who, by all accounts, were paid for services they did not render. It is a department that, for more than five years, has been incapable of making up its mind as to whether or not to proceed with the construction of more public-private partnership prisons. I am delighted that the Minister today announced that it is going ahead. If she had not made that announcement, it would have done huge damage to the government's reputation as a reliable institution with which to do business.
It is a department that since 2001 has had eight successive qualified audits. It is a department that installs hugely expensive security turnstiles and automated doors that have to be overridden because they no longer work. This same department awarded a catering contract to a company that was investigated by the Special Investigating Unit and was found to have irregularly influenced tender specifications. Yet the department awarded this very same company multimillion rand contracts, as recently as last year. It is a department that spent almost R2 million on unnecessary adverts while it couldn't find the money to pay social workers properly. It is a department where many managers - the chairperson referred to it - seem incapable of managing, where senior officials have been caught up in travel and housing scandals, where too many employees are corrupt and where too many employees abscond from work without consequences. It is a department that has had three National Commissioners in as many years and has more acting personnel than an average dramatic production. Under these circumstances, should we be supporting this Budget Vote? I don't think so. [Applause.]