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

for his or her trial. The outcome of the trial will either be the conviction or acquittal of the person
arrested.
In 1999, the police recorded about 2,380,820 crimes, of which 562,821 went to court and
257,391 were prosecuted. Of the cases that were prosecuted, 202,587 resulted in a conviction.47
Those who are convicted will also be sentenced, and this sentence could range from a wholly
suspended sentence to a prison term. Only after the accused individual is convicted and
sentenced to prison does the Department of Correctional Services become involved. The role of
DCS is then to incarcerate and rehabilitate the convicted criminal, and to prepare him or her for
reintegration into society. If this process is successful, then the person who is arrested,
convicted and imprisoned will eventually be released and will not commit another crime.
One aspect of criminal behaviour which is not commonly understood is that a primary deterrent
for a would-be criminal is the likelihood that he or she will be caught. The effectiveness of the
police force in deterring crime can be seen in its ability to maintain an appropriate presence,
respond quickly to crisis situations, efficiently investigate crimes and make timeous and
accurate arrests. Car guards in a parking lot do not for example actually apprehend car thieves.
Rather, it is their presence that deters the theft from taking place because it increases the
likelihood that the car thief will be caught.
Even if the penalty for car theft is death, if the police force is ill-trained, ill-equipped, and
understaffed to the point that it is unlikely that any arrest will be made or that sufficient evidence
will be gathered to support a conviction, then even the death penalty will not deter crime.
Similarly, when a car thief is strolling through an unguarded parking lot, he is more likely to be
thinking about the visible signs of alarm systems or gear locks than he is about the minimum
sentence for car theft. For this reason, increasingly harsh sentencing laws cannot deter crime
without appropriate support from the police department. Laws which call for longer sentences
and refusal to grant bail, without increasing the resources available for enforcing them, will
result in larger prison populations but not necessarily a reduction in crime.
A common misconception, perpetrated by politicians who exploit the public’s fear of crime in
order to gain votes, is that building prisons can reduce crime. Research in the field of
criminology and penology has consistently found that prisons do not deter crime. Muntingh, from
the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Reintegration of Offenders (NICRO),
observes
"Throughout the world, people are imprisoned in vast numbers without it having
resulted in any significant reduction in crime. The threat of punishment also does not
appear to have any significant impact in terms of preventing people from committing
offences. The fact that so many current prisoners are in fact recidivists and have
been in prison before, clearly shows the deterrence approach does not hold much
promise as a crime reduction strategy."48
Given that the Department of Correctional Services has no role in the arrest, conviction, or
sentencing components of the criminal justice system, it becomes clear that the DCS cannot
operate in isolation as a tool for the reduction of crime. The only role that prisons can play in
reducing crime is through rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders upon their release.
CHAPTER 3
PRISON PRIVATISATION