55000 languish in prisons awaiting trial

CAPE TOWN -- There were about 55 000 awaiting-trial prisoners languishing in prisons around the country, Inspecting Judge of Prisons Hannes Fagan said yesterday.

"This is a shocking -- the average conviction rate is about 35 percent -- and about 65 percent won't be convicted after sitting in prison for up to two years," the judge said after being presented with a prison visits report by the Law Society of South Africa.

The report was compiled by members of the Human Rights Standing Committee of the Law Society of South Africa after they visited 12 prisons countrywide, to mark the 2001 International Human Rights Day (December 10) activities.

The presentation was attended by Correctional Services Minister Ben Skosana, Fagan, Western Cape Independent Complaints Director Riaz Saloojee, and Western Cape provincial police commissioner Lennit Max.

Fagan said South Africa did not need more prisons. "We need less prisoners."

Skosana said overcrowding in prisons needed to be addressed.

During the apartheid era prisons had been used as "a mode of punishment". However, in the new democracy the country had begun focusing on human rights in prisons.

The report makes a number of recommendations, one being that new open prisons should be built on the outskirts of cities, as the present prisons were no longer adequate for their purposes.

The report said one of the reasons why prisoners could not be allowed to exercise at some of the prisons was a lack of space for soccer fields and other open areas.

The filling of vacant medical posts with Correctional Services should receive priority. "There is an Aids epidemic in the country, with full-blown Aids and other communicable diseases flourishing in the prisons."

Adequate clothing and blankets should be made available to all prisoners with immediate effect while social workers should ensure that minors who have been given free bail and released into the custody of their parents are quickly and effectively removed from prison.

The report also recommends that smoking and non-smoking prisoners should be separated -- in line with the new anti-smoking regulations.

Other recommendations were that training in human rights for all prison officers should be urgently outsourced and that distribution of condoms to inmates should be made a priority.

The Law Society of South Africa said it believed attorneys could play important roles in some of the recommendations. -- Sapa