prison privatisation in south africa issues, challenges and ...

than five fold since 1995, and continues to climb. The Judicial Inspectorate has projected that in
2010, nearly 45,000 prisoners will die while incarcerated.40
When a person becomes infected with HIV, he or she may not develop AIDS for five or even ten
years. A person in progressed stages of AIDS is usually bedridden, unable to eat, and extremely
weak. In prison, this last stage seems to last less than six months. The amount of time between
infection with HIV and the onset of full-blown AIDS is affected by nutrition, stress, and
availability of medication. In prison, nutrition is poor, the conditions of overcrowding are
stressful, and there is little medication available. There is no information on how long it takes for
an HIV positive prisoner to develop AIDS in South Africa. In other countries, the effects of the
prison environment cuts in half the life expectancy of an HIV positive prisoner.41
TB
When a person’s immune system is compromised by infection with HIV, they become more
susceptible to other illnesses, referred to as opportunistic infections. The most common
opportunistic infection in South Africa is tuberculosis (TB). HIV and TB are a deadly
combination, as each infection speeds the progress of the other. It is estimated that one third of
HIV positive people world-wide are also infected with TB.42
TB is caused by tubercle bacilli, which infects a person’s lungs and is a very contagious disease.
One of the symptoms of TB is severe coughing, and a person can catch TB by breathing the air
contaminated by an infected person’s coughing. Unlike HIV, TB can spread by simply sharing a
cell with a person who is sick with TB. Not everyone who becomes infected with tubercle bacilli
will develop active TB, but a person with HIV is 30 times more likely to develop active TB than a
person who does not have HIV.43 Conditions in prisons such as overcrowding and poor
ventilation also increase the spread of TB.
Many adults can be TB carriers but will not develop any symptoms until their immune system is
compromised, such as by infection with HIV. An asymptomatic TB carrier infected with HIV thus
becomes actively contagious, contributing to increased TB infection in the rest of the
population.44 In this way, HIV causes an increase in the spread of TB, and other infectious
diseases, to other HIV-negative people. It is estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, "one out of
every four TB deaths among HIV-negative people would not have occurred in the absence of
the HIV epidemic."45
Unlike HIV, TB is both highly contagious and curable. The most common form of TB is
pulmonary, meaning that the illness infects the lungs. Symptoms usually include violent
coughing, involving the dispersion of infected sputum. Inhalation of airborne droplets of infected
sputum is the most common means of contracting TB. Thus, contagiousness of TB can be
compounded by areas which have a great deal of people crowded into a small, poorly ventilated
space.46
The Department of Correctional Services and criminal justice
The Department of Correctional Services is only one component of the criminal justice system.
A successful criminal justice system will serve to reduce and deter criminal behaviour. However,
this goal does not belong to the prisons alone but also to the police, courts and other
government departments such as education and welfare. The South African criminal justice
system begins with the police who arrest alleged perpetrators of crimes and gather evidence.
The accused person is then charged by the prosecution service and required to appear in court