CURB THE VENGEANCE – Special Assignment Tue 12/4
Special Assignment takes us on another mind-opening journey but this time into the prisons of SA – Don’t miss the show next Tuesday 12 April.
South African prisons are bursting at the seams. We have the largest number of prisoners in Africa, with 185 thousand South Africans incarcerated. Problem is there is only space for 115 thousand inmates. So 70 thousand prisoners a…
re crammed into our jails in steadily worsening conditions. There is barely space for exercise, let alone rehabilitation.
It’s a subject that evokes much passion and anger. Victims of crime say too much is made of the rights of prisoners. But a man who describes himself as “a real jailbird”, 77 year old Judge Hannes Fagan, is outraged.
“We are the 3rd worst country in the world for our love of incarceration. Four out of every thousand South Africans in prison. We are completely out of touch…what are we doing?”
Fagan, who heads the Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons, lays the blame for over-crowding at the doors of Parliament, which passed minimum sentence legislation in response to crime. It sets out a string of minimum sentences that courts have to impose for certain types of crime. As a result, the prison population has shot up and human rights advocates are aghast.
Vincent Saldanha of the Law Society, who has visited prisons countrywide, has urged government to reconsider the legislation when it comes up for review at the end of April 2005. “No society should be burdened by having so many life prisoners. It is not the answer to the public baying for blood. We need to be more creative about our sentencing”.
Special Assignment goes into South African prisons and introduces viewers to inmates like Byron Smith, who received a 15 year minimum sentence for dealing in cocaine. But he says his real punishment was the death of his mother from a terminal illness. They wouldn’t let me see her. All I wanted to do was to say goodbye to the old lady. No one feels sorry for you in those situations. For me that was my sentence. It shaped my heart.
We meet Charne Brown, a mother who runs her home from her cell in the women’s section of Port Elizabeth’s notorious “Rooi He””. “There are a lot of people that don’t belong here. Why can’t we get correctional supervision? Nothing is done here to help you change. There is no rehabilitation. You change yourself”.
In the words of Judge Hannes Fagan: “It is vindictive! It is vengeance!”
“CURB THE VENGEANCE” was directed by Jessica Pitchford and was filmed by Byron Taylor and Thulo Monare.
SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT
SABC3
12 April 2005
2130
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