Victims to be videolinked to parole cases

Video conferencing will be used to connect victims of crime to all 53 Correctional Supervision and Parole offices in South Africa to allow them to become part of parole hearings.

Parole hearings hit the headlines last week when apartheid-era death squad commander Eugene de Kock was denied parole because families of victims had not been consulted.

Justice and Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha deferred a decision on Mr de Kock’s parole application for 12 months for the consultations.

On Wednesday, Mr Masutha, after introducing his budget vote in the National Assembly, went into gentle debate with opposition MPs. They said aggressive attack would be unfair as it should target the previous leadership of what was perhaps the government’s most dysfunctional department.

Mr Masutha said the department would launch the video conferencing facilities at a cost of about R10m in November.

"This innovation is intended to help reduce the barriers to participation in parole hearings such as physical distance and language … (in) our efforts of centralising victims in the determination of offender parole hearings."

Phenomenal progress had been made since 2009 in mobilising victims to participate in parole hearings from just 108 to 1,125 cases a year. But this still represented less than 5% of hearings that lead to parole placements of offenders, which roughly total 25,000.

The video conferencing capacity would be built with funding from the Criminal Asset Recovery Account, and victims would be informed to go to their nearest parole offices and be linked to the actual parole board hearings.

Mr Masutha told the assembly that the overcrowding in prisons would be "managed down".

"The resolve of the South African government to fight crime through, among others, the introduction of minimum-sentence legislation and the broadening of the sentencing jurisdiction to cover lower courts, resulted in an exponential increase of inmate population between 1995 and 2004 from 116,846 to 187,036."

This had worsened the country’s international profile in respect of incarceration rates, registering 403 inmates per 100,000 people, he said.

The overcrowding management strategy had borne good results "as we reduced the inmate population by 31,000 from 187,036 in 2004 to 157,170 by the end of March 2014, a reduction of 29,866 in 10 years, which equals 16%", Mr Masutha said.

Democratic Alliance MP James Selfe said the country needed to have a regime of unpleasant and corrective but noncustodial sentences that could be applied to first-time, nonviolent and young offenders.

"There are no rehabilitative programmes for such inmates, so it costs the taxpayer R54,000 a year simply to warehouse him, in already overcrowded cells. Frankly, it makes no sense," Mr Selfe said.

"The Department of Correctional Services is tainted with corruption and requires transformation. It requires radical transformation. But is the minister up to doing this?

"That is the question he needs to answer before we will support this budget vote," he said.