Cape Town - “Jail was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was ready to commit suicide. I had collected enough pills to do away with myself, but the words of my 7-year-old daughter stopped me: ‘Mommy, please just go away for a few years, but not forever’.”
Tracy van der Westhuizen, 42, has been an inmate at Pollsmoor’s female facility for one year and five months, and will still be one for a minimum of two years and one month before she is eligible for parole.
Dressed in denim prison garb, her blue eyes serene, she explained how she had committed fraud of around half-a-million rand to feed her compulsive gambling problem, and that she was getting away with it as an accountant for a local girls’ school. But her nerves were shot and she decided “enough is enough”. She handed herself over for fraud and was given seven years in Pollsmoor by magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg.
According to the charge sheet, Van der Westhuizen was the school’s bursar and perpetrated the fraud by not banking money received by the school each day. She failed to issue receipts to each and every person as their proof of payment. According to the charge sheet, she also failed to indicate the methods of payments received, which made it difficult to reconcile the ledgers. Often, when cash payments were made, she recorded the method of payment as being by bank card. She kept locker and music fees, money received for school clothing and photocopies, donations to the school, and the proceeds of fund-raising events.
“Yes,” she said, “I did those things, and when I get out of here, I am going to make reparation to the people I defrauded. I can’t get the money back, but I need them to know how very sorry I am. Recidivism here is high, but when I come back here in the future, I will be a counsellor and theologian, not a prisoner.”
Van der Westhuizen is also studying Health and Nutrition in Adverse Conditions through Unisa and last year received 91 percent for the exam and 100 percent for her portfolio, making her the top achiever in that field in the country.
She is one of the many who slip through the system - had she had psychological help as a child, this may never have happened: Her father sexually molested her for 11 years, from the age of five through to 16. She told her mother, who chose to believe her husband’s denial. He also molested Van der Westhuizen’s sisters and later went on to molest her daughter. “There are 10 grandchildren in the family and nine of them are girls. Every time one was born, I would think ‘Oh no, not another victim, please’.”
Van der Westhuizen became a Christian in Pollsmoor and astonishingly decided to forgive her father for the immense physical and psychological trauma he had subjected her to for over a decade. “He’s still my father; he did a lot of bad, but he also did a lot of good.”
By the time Van der Westhuizen was jailed, her father was unwell and he died of a heart attack three months into her sentence. Her daughter brought a gift from him, though: a pink thong necklace and a cross with the Lord’s Prayer inscribed on it. She never saw him again. She wears it every day.
Van der Westhuizen participates in all the activities at Pollsmoor and is even learning robotics and computer programming. “I always thought I was too stupid to get a degree; I am not the same person I used to be at all. Fortunately my husband and children are there for me - they visit every Sunday without fail. At my court case, I asked the magistrate, ‘What about my children?’, and she said ‘You haven’t been caring for your children anyway’. And it was true: I would think nothing of putting them in a creche all day and spending the time at GrandWest.
“It’s definitely not been an easy journey. I never used to have any respect for myself, so I knew I had to work on that before I could recover.
“Talking to other people and relating to their experience has helped me a lot - now I know I’m not the only one who has been through all this.”
And that is the sad reality: Van der Westhuizen says almost all the women inmates have been physically, emotionally or psychologically abused. “Jail is full of broken people who really just want to be loved. And until they find it, they’ll just keep on offending.”
Pollsmoor officials have so much faith in Van der Westhuizen that she runs the monthly tuckshop. It’s a cashless system, but in jail everything can be converted to money somehow.
“I may be incarcerated, but I am free. Pollsmoor saved my life and turned it around. And if you do the crime, you must do the time. I’m not a victim, I’m a victor now, and I need to make amends. There’s a reason I’m here that involves more than just my punishment. In 17 months I have turned my life around, and I still have two-and-a-half years to work on myself.”
Because Van der Westhuizen is a student she has a single cell, although she knows from experience what communal cells are like. “I feel sorry for the warders - some of the inmates are extremely disrespectful and are beyond angry. It takes time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and take responsibility.”
Tracy’s next plan is to learn Xhosa. “I want to tete with the warders and other Xhosa women here.”
Cape Times