Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

and with some pride showed us his handiwork, the white painted Töben
posts. Beyond the grassed area were the citrus orchards that obviously
needed some pruning. Fredrick told us that a team, led by a Vietnamese,
was attending to the trees.
The greatest number of prisoners are drug-dependent and not much
training appears to be going on at the “Cadell Training Centre” in our
time, as perhaps was once intended. The establishment is now in existence
for 50 years and no doubt has seen many changes. Maybe in the past a
place of almost total self-sufficiency was envisaged and no doubt quite
possible.
At present Cadell is still administered by the SA government, but for how
much longer, before a private security firm takes over? The cost-cutting
firms that I had read of in the account of Pastor Jim Bakker's
imprisonment in the USA, are certainly a very different and rather
horrendous experience in comparison to the easy-going Cadell Training
Centre.
* * *
I considered myself lucky in receiving visitors, but there is also a downside
to this, which I have noted in all prisons, the emotional roller-coaster before
and after visits.
Some prisoners feel down before visits, then pick up during the visit and
sprightly welcome the new week until that down takes hold of them again.
Others have the reverse feeling as they anticipate the visit and the days draw
nearer. Then there are others like Jim, who has spent over 20 years inside
and freely admits to being institutionalised, who does not really want
anyone to visit him. Letters and phone calls are enough of an outside
contact for him.
I was fortunate in that I received numerous letters that filled me in on what
was going on outside. It is always interesting when strangers write to you
because it means the message of legal persecution has reached beyond the
insider circle.
Sometimes I felt a little sorry for the office staff that had to open each letter
and cut out each stamp, just in case drugs were enclosed inside the
envelope or somehow stuck beneath the stamp. The volume of mail that I
received caused some officers to wonder whom they had locked up. Mail
from all over the world indicated that my matter was a global issue, not just
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