Management of Remand Detainees in South Africa - DCS-Home

Department of Health. LASA provides legal assistance to the poor and indigent irrespective of the
nationality. Department of health provides forensic assessment to RDs referred by courts in term of
the Criminal Procedure Act.
9.6.1 Summary of Challenges
SAPS does not have a legal mandate to detain RDs beyond the period of 48 hours
except in situations where the extension has been granted by a court to allow for further
investigations.
The provisions for management of RDs emanate from several pieces of legislations
which are often not all acknowledged by the detention institutions. In DCS for
instance, there is tendency to make broad reference to some legislation in policies without
any mention of the applicable sections. This practice has led to disregard of some
legislative provisions when operationalizing the legal framework into policy manuals, and
operational procedures.
There is discrepancy between the provisions of the Correctional Services Act and
operational policies in certain areas such as section 22 on discipline applies to inmates
and by implication the section is applicable to RDs and sentenced offenders. However it is
worth noting that the operational policy on discipline is only applicable to sentenced
offenders.
There is no uniformity in the definition of the term “offender” in the Development and
Care policy which is a guiding policy for programme and services in DCS and its
subordinate policies such as Psychological Services, Formal Education and Spiritual Care
Policy.
There is confusion in the definition of terms which emanates from the Correctional
Services Act and its amendments. While the term inmate (previously known as prisoner)
applies to all detainees in DCS facilities, the term unsentenced offender is only applicable to
convicted offenders who have not been sentenced to imprisonment. This would imply that
chapter 5 of the Correctional Services Act only applies to convicted offenders. In practice
DCS does not have a system for identification of this category of detainees.
Other challenges which were identified during the situational analysis visits to selected
police cells, SCFs and RDFs are:
o Lack of established mechanisms (such as protocols) to address cross cutting
functions and areas of co-responsibility within the JCPS cluster such as (but not limited
to) transportation of RDs, provision of services to RDs.
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