Cape Town – Justice Edwin Cameron says the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services (JICS) needs more powers to fulfil its mandate of inspecting, investigating, reporting and making recommendations on living conditions in prisons.
The watchdog’s job is to inspect, investigate, report and make recommendations on the living conditions in South African prisons.
It is facing a large number of challenges including a lack of resources and unbinding recommendations.
Speaking on Newzroom Afrika, Justice Cameron, said the struggle of the JICS goes back to the Mandela era when it was created, which is a complete innovation to have a judge headed inspectorate checking on what was happening in prisons.
“It was created with two fewer pies, so there is now a process to make the JICS more independent and more powerful.
“That process is stored because we’ve been struggling with the treasury to get enough funds to become more really independent.
“The Constitutional Court two years ago ruled that the JICS has to be autonomous and independent and with the help of the minister and the department they’ve all been supportive.
“There is going to be a statute before the Parliament next year that gives the JICS to expand its powers on what has to be reported onto it and what the department must do when we make recommendations and findings in which we are going to beef up our powers to,” he said.
He further highlighted that one of the things that are happening in the current democracy is that the country has gone terribly wrong in crime management and prisons are part of crime management but the whole managing strategy of prisons is catastrophically wrong.
“We cannot reduce murder, rape and other violent crimes by locking up a small number of people forever and we tried to do that but what we have to do is to fix crime intelligence.
“We have to fix the NPA which the government is still struggling to do but Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Ronald Lamola is on the side of strengthening it and those are key areas that can assist us in these situations,” he said.
Cameron touched on the issue of human treatment of prisoners and urging people to give prisoners a second in society because that can also assist reduce crime.
With the latest crimes statistics issued, he maintained that it won’t make any sense to fill prisons while prisons have their own challenges.
He said the JICS needed more co-operation because at the moment they were not getting it and they understood that the NPA and SAPS were overstretched, and there were elementary organisation issues affecting the SAPS.
Cameron said the new statute increases the circle of items that have to be reported to the JICS at the moment for example when prisoners were being put in chains when they're isolated and used force that has to be reported to the watchdog.
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