Programme News
22 August 2014
(News)
After Llewellyn Smith was brutally assaulted, stripped naked, electro-shocked and tortured in the Leeuwkop Max C prison showers last week, his wife Malanie brought an urgent application in the South Gauteng High Court requesting that her husband was granted permission to see a private medical practitioner, that he was x-rayed and permitted to lay charges with the SAPS.
About 20 other inmates also...
6 August 2014
(News)
That there is corruption in South African prisons is no secret – but the actual extent of it might never be known for sure.
A few recent incidents taken up in the media give us a hint – issues at Leeuhof Prison, in Vereeniging, Gauteng, which were revealed in June, were just one example. "Gangsters and wardens are still smuggling dagga, heroin and crack cocaine; criminals are...
5 August 2014
(News)
Ever wondered what it’s like to be caught up in the South African legal system, or wondered what a person accused of a crime, or their family, goes through while waiting for their case to be resolved? BHEKI SIMELANE spent a day at the Protea Magistrates Court. This is what he found.
Mapule Ntjangase, 31, White City
I’m here to support my younger brother but I cannot tell you what...
5 August 2014
(News)
The Wits Justice Project has recently released our latest booklet, ‘When perpetrator becomes victim: reports on torture in South Africa.’ The compilation features award-winning investigative journalism by our senior journalists Carolyn Raphaely and Ruth Hopkins and is a much needed expose on instances of torture being committed in present day South Africa.
Read the full compilation...
17 July 2014
(News)
Justice and Correctional Services Minister Mike Masutha wants to stop sending people convicted of petty crimes to jail in a bid to eliminate overcrowding.
Masutha said his newly merged department would encourage the courts to use the diversion of sentences programme instead of increasing the prison population.
In terms of the programme, a person found guilty of shoplifting would be sentenced to...
17 July 2014
(News)
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...
10 July 2014
(News)
OPINION: On a warm summer’s morning in June 1961, a penniless odd-jobber by the name of Gideon Clarence was discovered in a seedy bar in Panama City, a town in the state of Florida, the US.
When the police tracked him down, he was described as drinking on the morning shift, his trousers “hanging low, weighted by exactly $25.28 in coins”. Clarence, with a history of theft,...
27 June 2014
(News)
On the first of April next year, the South African Police Service (SAPS) will commemorate 20 years as a democratic police service – but sadly it has not always lived up to public expectations of democratic policing. In the past decade, especially, increasing levels of corruption, criminality and brutality have seriously tarnished the SAPS’s image.
Incidents such as the killing in...
22 June 2014
(News)
Gangsters and wardens are still smuggling dagga, heroin and crack cocaine, criminals are still hiding knives and sharpened objects in the “mineshaft” and inmates are stockpiling condoms for sex.
That’s according to an inmate who sent SMSes to CityPress from inside the prison just a week after we exposed an orgy of corruption, smuggling and rape in Leeuhof, and...
15 June 2014
(News)
This is cell 14, into which warders smuggle everything from shopping bags full of hard drugs to juvenile prisoners for inmates to rape.
Graphic details of what happens inside the 168m² cell in Leeuhof Prison, outside Vereeniging, were revealed to City Press in 300 text messages and 80 cellphone pictures by inmate and fraud accused Eugene Viljoen.
Viljoen – who for three months shared...