Choosing the wrong friends could mean a one-way ticket to prison, pupils from Vukani Secondary School in Mpumalanga heard during their visit to Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre in Pretoria on Friday.
They were urged to heed the warning before they ended up in prison for life.
This was the message of a prisoner at the Kgosi Mampuru, who cannot be named.
He was sentenced to life in prison for murder and armed robbery.
He said he started smoking cigarettes at a young age and resorted to stealing for money.
Before long, he became involved with the wrong friends which, he said, led him to more serious crimes like armed robbery and murder.
William Msiza, deputy director of crime prevention in the Mpumalanga Department of Community Safety, Security and Liaison in the Kgangala region, said: “We like to tell the pupils to choose their ‘darlings’ carefully. By darlings we mean their friends,” he said.
Msiza organised a trip so pupils at the school could get a reality check of what poor behaviour in school could lead them to.
“It is part of the school safety programme. We try to bring troublesome learners to a prison environment and we present this image to them to motivate them to do the right things,” Msiza said.
He said various schools took part in the programme, because they needed an extra hand in dealing with pupils with behavioural problems. Most of them smoked drugs or cigarettes, which added to their behavioural problems, and they were then considered habitual pupils.
Ane Mentz, a correctional services official at the prison, also told them what behaviour to avoid.
“Do you think lawyers and doctors and ministers smoke weed? And I’m not talking about celebrities who think they are cool; I’m talking about the top people who have made it,” she said to them.
She asked the pupils, aged between 15 and 19, how old children needed to be to be imprisoned, and when they said 18, Mentz shocked them by saying children as young as 13 had been imprisoned.
She discouraged the children from smoking.
Msiza said he hoped parents would find NGOs or programmes that would help their children avoid delinquent behaviour.
Pretoria News Weekend