A raid on Sun City prison in Johannesburg found PlayStations, flat-screen plasma TVs, weapons and drugs. Chris Barron asked national correctional services commissioner Makgothi Thobakgale ...
Q: How rotten is our prison system, and what are you doing about it apart from a well publicised raid on Sun City?
A: We cannot expose all our operations to the media. With Sun City, we wanted to send a message to the public that it’s not like we’re just sitting and not attending to this situation.
Q: How long has Sun City been on your radar?
A: For the past six months.
Q: Why did you raid it only this week?
A: This was the execution phase of a security plan we’ve been working on for six months. When we get an alert, we quietly gather information. We don’t just jump in. We’ve been doing searches there every week since June.
Q: Given what you’ve found, have you suspended the head of Sun City?
A: There’s an investigation we’re conducting, given the amount of contraband we collected so far.
Q: In spite of this, he’s still running the prison?
A: Yes, because as it stands we have not made a finding.
Q: Haven’t you seen enough to act against him?
A: We have to take action within the labour relations legal framework.
Q: Shouldn’t the person in charge while this stuff has been going on at least have been suspended?
A: You need to appreciate that even suspension is a subject of the labour relations legal framework.
Q: How many rogue officials in the prison system are we talking about?
A: I can’t say outright. What I can indicate is that we have run disciplinary hearings in different centres based on transgressions. Out of 322 we have 77% completed with the rest at an advanced stage.
Q: Are you acting quickly enough against the transgressors?
A: Yes, but you don’t want a situation where you have a substantive case but procedurally you’re not able to have a positive outcome because you did not comply.
Q: Meanwhile, prisoners boast that they’re living a soft life?
A: They’re not living a soft life. When journalists ask me this I say to them: tell me if what you see here is a soft life.
Q: What we see are PlayStations, bluetooth speakers, flat-screen plasma TVs ...
A: It’s one offender who had a PlayStation console, and we’ll get to the bottom of it.
Q: What about inmates running criminal syndicates?
A: I wouldn’t say they’re criminal syndicates. What I would say is that there is contraband that makes it into a correctional facility. And this has been a problem over the years, it’s not something that just happened last week.
Q: That’s the worrying thing, isn’t it?
A: Yes. That’s why we are now at an advanced stage of ensuring that we get technological apparatuses that will help us, because the human capacity we have cannot cope with this proliferation.
Q: Because so many wardens are on the payroll of inmates?
A: I would not necessarily say that. I would say that there are officials that we catch in the act of participating in smuggling contraband, and most of them get dismissed. But I wouldn’t say it’s the majority. If it was the majority, the prison system in this country would be in chaos, and it’s not ... compared to what we’ve seen in other countries.
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