Date: 07/10/2003
Source: Ministry of Correctional Services
Title: Skosana: JCPS breakfast media briefing
SPEECH BY THE MINISTER OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICE, BEN SKOSANA, AT THE JCPS CLUSTER MINISTERS' BREAKFAST BRIEFING TO EMBASSIES, CONSULATES, AND THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS' ASSOCIATION (FCA), Sheraton Hotel, Pretoria, Tuesday, 7 October 2003
The groundbreaking democratisation of South Africa in 1994 has had a ripple effect in the form of transformation across all spheres of life in the country. Nowhere else in our society has this change been more acutely felt and vigorously pursued than in state institutions.
Correctional Services, being one of these, finds itself in the throes of a major transformation, which has brought with it daunting challenges alongside major opportunities. What we have come to call the re-writing of the story of corrections in South Africa encapsulates both these challenges and opportunities and brings them into focus.
It serves as a rallying call for the South African people, the members of Correctional Services and the people entrusted to our care to understand each of our roles in correcting what is wrong in South African society and what contributes to crime. Several areas stand out as key definers of the emerging Department of Correctional Services in our country today.
These include:
* recognising the reason of existence of our prisons, community corrections offices and the correctional system, as being to make a contribution to public safety and crime prevention through safe, secure and humane custody and supervision, alongside promotion of social responsibility and human development.
* a robust initiative to reach out to the world as we reposition ourselves within the broader government programme of development
* engaging our African counterparts to generate African solutions to the challenges of corrections in Africa, with particular emphasis on the Southern African region
* a relentless effort to re-profile and insert corrections into crucial multi-lateral forums in our continent.
It is along these areas, your Excellencies, colleagues, friends and partners, that I would like to address you this morning. I will invite you to provide your information to us by filling out the forms handed out so that we can include it in our database with a view to initiate an ongoing interaction with you that will ensure consistent information flow about our transformation agenda, our challenges and successes.
The 1996 Constitution of South Africa ushered in an era of human rights, which paved the way for the redefinition of our mandate from punitive to decidedly rehabilitative. In a major departure from our unsavoury past, our reason of existence today is being built on correction security, care and development as the cornerstones of the project of re-writing our story. Rehabilitation simply stated, means that a person who leaves our care upon completion of a sentence, or on parole, must be measurably different from the one sent to us by the courts after conviction.
A concerted targeting of the offending behaviour rather than punishment, seeks to recreate a criminal worldview into that of reconciliation, and positive socially responsible disposition on the part of offenders. This outcome is a key consideration in the design of our facilities, in the design of correction plans for offenders, in our daily interaction with them as Correctional Officers, as well as in the manner in which we strive to mobilise communities as partners in correction.
Central to the attainment of the object of rehabilitation are the rehabilitators themselves. This is our most important resource in the pursuit of our rehabilitation ideals. Every member of our department is a rehabilitator with a duty to contribute to creating a rehabilitation-encouraging environment. Our new culture as rehabilitators presupposes decency, humanity, fairness, and a high degree of compatibility between our attitudes and the Code of Ethics of the department.
That culture requires of us to ensure the safety of all correctional clients, zero escapes, good order in correctional centres and the provision of opportunities to correctional clients that prepare them for their reintegration back into their society. Retraining of our staff in this new culture is our major priority to enable ourselves to lead correctional clients by example.
We owe much of this new agenda of corrections to various countries and governments of the world. Since our paradigm shift which saw the adoption of rehabilitation as our core business, we have visited a number of countries around the globe. From this, we learned a lot of valuable lessons and our approach to modern corrections improved tremendously. We learned from your best correctional practices and adapted them to our unique South African reality. Our bilateral and multilateral relations with a number of countries and international organisations around the world have strengthened.
Our abiding challenge is to adequately insert corrections and justice into crucial African multilateral forums in support of the current developmental endeavours on the continent. We strongly feel, together with our African partners, that corrections and justice must be brought to the centre of the African agenda. All along, corrections and justice, at best, remained on the fringes of the African Union's (AU) agenda and those of its regional bodies including the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Economic Organisation of West African States and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa).
We are of the opinion that corrections have a significant role to play in stability, security and social transformation. Its exclusion by these important multilateral organisations cannot be in the best interest of the peoples of the continent. Hence at the beginning of July we convened a meeting in Johannesburg of Ministers responsible for corrections in the SADC member states. Ten countries attended. It was for the first time that they all met to discuss corrections.
At the end of the meeting the Johannesburg Declaration, which, in our view, heralds a new beginning for corrections in the region, was adopted. The Declaration notes that prisons are about crime fighting, reducing recidivism, and building a safer society. The Ministers committed SADC to pioneer new strategic thinking in the running of prisons as centres of new beginnings. Critical areas of regional co-operation were identified including technical co-operation; human resource development, exchange of security information, penal reform, and the implementation of minimum standards in line with African declarations and international instruments relevant to corrections. We are working for the creation of a common philosophy on correction, rehabilitation, and reintegration of offenders.
As SADC Ministers, we hope that the success of a multi-lateral corrections and justice platform may have a positive influence on other correctional services across our continent. The ultimate aim is to create a similar component within the AU. The Ministers recognised that the future of Africa will be determined by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and they agreed to explore how corrections can benefit from and popularise the programme. They acknowledged that the prisoners we are rehabilitating are being prepared for a NEPAD-driven continent and that NEPAD must now inform our correctional and rehabilitation programmes.
Following up on the Johannesburg Declaration, we moved swiftly to further consolidate our bilateral relations with countries in the region. Last month a technical team, at the invitation of our Zambian partners, was dispatched to explore possible areas of cooperation between our countries. Another team is preparing to travel to Lesotho shortly to follow up on outstanding issues related to the Joint Bilateral Commission of Cooperation between our two countries. We are going to further intensify this liaison with our regional partners at every available opportunity.
Surely this is a very encouraging picture, but it is also an incomplete one.
Our project is not without its teething problems. Chronic and gross overcrowding, corruption, issues of HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases, drug abuse and violence in our facilities present the most daunting challenges as we transform our department. Various intervention programmes are either in progress or are being implemented to deal with these problems.
These include:
(1) enlisting support of various investigation and prosecuting agencies in fighting graft in our department, - you probably have heard about institutions like the Jali Commission and the Special Investigative Unit operating in our prisons (2) harnessing the collective strength of the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster of government as an integrated response to overcrowding, - this approach has made responses like sentence diversion, Saturday courts, plea bargaining, and alternative sentencing realistic options (3) engaging professional bodies in conducting research aimed at establishing the extent and impact of HIV/AIDS in our prisons.
We are confident that as the Correctional Services family, working closely with our partners in government, business and in society, we will prevail over all of these challenges in due course. Our hope is founded on a shared commitment to make a difference in positioning corrections as an important joint government and community programme to heal the wounds of crime, promote security and to eliminate recidivism and criminality.
The re-writing of the story of corrections in South Africa is a story of the transformation of the agenda of corrections and of the structure that has to carry out that agenda. On both these fronts, change in our department is palpable, driven both from within and outside, hailed and criticised in a recurring public discourse as our democratic nation comes to terms with the realities of our present times. We realise that it is imperative for us to seek to bring you on board with our project knowing all too well that our burgeoning efforts towards transforming our prisons from human warehouses to centres of new beginnings can only benefit from a solid and sustained partnership with eminent minds like yours.
Please be invited. Be part of it. I thank you
Issued by: Ministry of Correctional Services, 7 October 2003
Source: Department of Correctional Services (http://www.dcs.gov.za)
Source: Ministry of Correctional Services
Title: Skosana: JCPS breakfast media briefing
SPEECH BY THE MINISTER OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICE, BEN SKOSANA, AT THE JCPS CLUSTER MINISTERS' BREAKFAST BRIEFING TO EMBASSIES, CONSULATES, AND THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS' ASSOCIATION (FCA), Sheraton Hotel, Pretoria, Tuesday, 7 October 2003
The groundbreaking democratisation of South Africa in 1994 has had a ripple effect in the form of transformation across all spheres of life in the country. Nowhere else in our society has this change been more acutely felt and vigorously pursued than in state institutions.
Correctional Services, being one of these, finds itself in the throes of a major transformation, which has brought with it daunting challenges alongside major opportunities. What we have come to call the re-writing of the story of corrections in South Africa encapsulates both these challenges and opportunities and brings them into focus.
It serves as a rallying call for the South African people, the members of Correctional Services and the people entrusted to our care to understand each of our roles in correcting what is wrong in South African society and what contributes to crime. Several areas stand out as key definers of the emerging Department of Correctional Services in our country today.
These include:
* recognising the reason of existence of our prisons, community corrections offices and the correctional system, as being to make a contribution to public safety and crime prevention through safe, secure and humane custody and supervision, alongside promotion of social responsibility and human development.
* a robust initiative to reach out to the world as we reposition ourselves within the broader government programme of development
* engaging our African counterparts to generate African solutions to the challenges of corrections in Africa, with particular emphasis on the Southern African region
* a relentless effort to re-profile and insert corrections into crucial multi-lateral forums in our continent.
It is along these areas, your Excellencies, colleagues, friends and partners, that I would like to address you this morning. I will invite you to provide your information to us by filling out the forms handed out so that we can include it in our database with a view to initiate an ongoing interaction with you that will ensure consistent information flow about our transformation agenda, our challenges and successes.
The 1996 Constitution of South Africa ushered in an era of human rights, which paved the way for the redefinition of our mandate from punitive to decidedly rehabilitative. In a major departure from our unsavoury past, our reason of existence today is being built on correction security, care and development as the cornerstones of the project of re-writing our story. Rehabilitation simply stated, means that a person who leaves our care upon completion of a sentence, or on parole, must be measurably different from the one sent to us by the courts after conviction.
A concerted targeting of the offending behaviour rather than punishment, seeks to recreate a criminal worldview into that of reconciliation, and positive socially responsible disposition on the part of offenders. This outcome is a key consideration in the design of our facilities, in the design of correction plans for offenders, in our daily interaction with them as Correctional Officers, as well as in the manner in which we strive to mobilise communities as partners in correction.
Central to the attainment of the object of rehabilitation are the rehabilitators themselves. This is our most important resource in the pursuit of our rehabilitation ideals. Every member of our department is a rehabilitator with a duty to contribute to creating a rehabilitation-encouraging environment. Our new culture as rehabilitators presupposes decency, humanity, fairness, and a high degree of compatibility between our attitudes and the Code of Ethics of the department.
That culture requires of us to ensure the safety of all correctional clients, zero escapes, good order in correctional centres and the provision of opportunities to correctional clients that prepare them for their reintegration back into their society. Retraining of our staff in this new culture is our major priority to enable ourselves to lead correctional clients by example.
We owe much of this new agenda of corrections to various countries and governments of the world. Since our paradigm shift which saw the adoption of rehabilitation as our core business, we have visited a number of countries around the globe. From this, we learned a lot of valuable lessons and our approach to modern corrections improved tremendously. We learned from your best correctional practices and adapted them to our unique South African reality. Our bilateral and multilateral relations with a number of countries and international organisations around the world have strengthened.
Our abiding challenge is to adequately insert corrections and justice into crucial African multilateral forums in support of the current developmental endeavours on the continent. We strongly feel, together with our African partners, that corrections and justice must be brought to the centre of the African agenda. All along, corrections and justice, at best, remained on the fringes of the African Union's (AU) agenda and those of its regional bodies including the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Economic Organisation of West African States and Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa).
We are of the opinion that corrections have a significant role to play in stability, security and social transformation. Its exclusion by these important multilateral organisations cannot be in the best interest of the peoples of the continent. Hence at the beginning of July we convened a meeting in Johannesburg of Ministers responsible for corrections in the SADC member states. Ten countries attended. It was for the first time that they all met to discuss corrections.
At the end of the meeting the Johannesburg Declaration, which, in our view, heralds a new beginning for corrections in the region, was adopted. The Declaration notes that prisons are about crime fighting, reducing recidivism, and building a safer society. The Ministers committed SADC to pioneer new strategic thinking in the running of prisons as centres of new beginnings. Critical areas of regional co-operation were identified including technical co-operation; human resource development, exchange of security information, penal reform, and the implementation of minimum standards in line with African declarations and international instruments relevant to corrections. We are working for the creation of a common philosophy on correction, rehabilitation, and reintegration of offenders.
As SADC Ministers, we hope that the success of a multi-lateral corrections and justice platform may have a positive influence on other correctional services across our continent. The ultimate aim is to create a similar component within the AU. The Ministers recognised that the future of Africa will be determined by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and they agreed to explore how corrections can benefit from and popularise the programme. They acknowledged that the prisoners we are rehabilitating are being prepared for a NEPAD-driven continent and that NEPAD must now inform our correctional and rehabilitation programmes.
Following up on the Johannesburg Declaration, we moved swiftly to further consolidate our bilateral relations with countries in the region. Last month a technical team, at the invitation of our Zambian partners, was dispatched to explore possible areas of cooperation between our countries. Another team is preparing to travel to Lesotho shortly to follow up on outstanding issues related to the Joint Bilateral Commission of Cooperation between our two countries. We are going to further intensify this liaison with our regional partners at every available opportunity.
Surely this is a very encouraging picture, but it is also an incomplete one.
Our project is not without its teething problems. Chronic and gross overcrowding, corruption, issues of HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases, drug abuse and violence in our facilities present the most daunting challenges as we transform our department. Various intervention programmes are either in progress or are being implemented to deal with these problems.
These include:
(1) enlisting support of various investigation and prosecuting agencies in fighting graft in our department, - you probably have heard about institutions like the Jali Commission and the Special Investigative Unit operating in our prisons (2) harnessing the collective strength of the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster of government as an integrated response to overcrowding, - this approach has made responses like sentence diversion, Saturday courts, plea bargaining, and alternative sentencing realistic options (3) engaging professional bodies in conducting research aimed at establishing the extent and impact of HIV/AIDS in our prisons.
We are confident that as the Correctional Services family, working closely with our partners in government, business and in society, we will prevail over all of these challenges in due course. Our hope is founded on a shared commitment to make a difference in positioning corrections as an important joint government and community programme to heal the wounds of crime, promote security and to eliminate recidivism and criminality.
The re-writing of the story of corrections in South Africa is a story of the transformation of the agenda of corrections and of the structure that has to carry out that agenda. On both these fronts, change in our department is palpable, driven both from within and outside, hailed and criticised in a recurring public discourse as our democratic nation comes to terms with the realities of our present times. We realise that it is imperative for us to seek to bring you on board with our project knowing all too well that our burgeoning efforts towards transforming our prisons from human warehouses to centres of new beginnings can only benefit from a solid and sustained partnership with eminent minds like yours.
Please be invited. Be part of it. I thank you
Issued by: Ministry of Correctional Services, 7 October 2003
Source: Department of Correctional Services (http://www.dcs.gov.za)
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