How the outdated criminal justice system fuels crime

THE Western Cape Province is ravaged by escalating drug and gang wars, worsened by severe failures by national government, especially within the SAPS.

- NICHOLAS GOTSELL

These wars are being fuelled from within our prison system — an institution meant to rehabilitate and reform. It is for this reason that I recently visited the Goodwood Correctional Centre to observe how remand detainees are processed upon arrival from court, specifically how contraband is detected and whether the system can reliably track who enters and exits.

The short answer is that it cannot. South Africans certainly have a reason to worry as most contraband, being drugs and phones, enter facilities through remanded detainees.

The SAPS and the Department of Correctional Services’ systems are antiquated and far from technological advancement. In fact, there is not a whiff of it.

At the core of it all lies a practice that defies reason: the fingerprints of each remand detainee who arrives at correctional facilities, taken earlier by the police, are compared visually — by the naked eye - to those taken again, by Correctional Services officials upon arrival.

No digital scanner, biometric verification, or shared systems between the SAPS, Justice, and Correctional Services. Just two wardens at a table, literally looking at fingerprint sheets, “confirming” that they match.

When detainees arrive from court, uncuffed, they are remanded to the centre under what is known as a J7 warrant of detention, waiting for their names to be called from the J7 list. This list is compiled at the court where they appeared, and apart from the fingerprint taken by the SAPS, the roll call relies solely on the name and surname provided by the detained person.

Each person is then led to the “fingerprint table” where their identity is checked manually. This means that the entire confirmation of a detainee’s identity depends on eyesight and memory, not science or data.