AN ANALYTICAL STUDY OF SOUTH AFRICAN PRISON REFORM AFTER 1994

Abstract

The history of prison reform after 1994 was shaped by the relationship between governance and human rights standards; the requirements for both are set out in the Constitution and elaborated on in the Correctional Services Act.Good governance and human rights converge in five dimensions of a constitutional democracy: legitimacy, transparency, accountability, the rule of law; and resource utilisation.The new constitutional order established a set of governance and rights requirements for the prison system demanding fundamental reform.It de-legitimised the existing prison system and thus placed it in a crisis.This required its reinvention to establish a system compatible with constitutional demands.The thesis investigates whether constitutionalism provided the necessary transformative basis for prison reform in South Africa after 1994.The Department of Correctional Services (DCS) senior management failed to anticipate this in the period 1990 to 1994.In the five years after 1994 senior management equally failed to initiate a fundamental reform process.This lack of vision, as well as a number of external factors relating to the state of the public service in the period 1994 to 2000, gave rise to a second crisis: the collapse of order and discipline in the DCS.By the late 1990s the state had lost control of the DCS and its internal workings can be described as a mess -a highly interactive set of problems in causal relationships.In many Reflecting on prison reform in South Africa after 1994 presented the opportunity to take stock of progress made towards giving life and meaning to the Constitution for those individuals deprived of their liberty in prison.Writing this thesis was a satisfying process on a personal, professional and intellectual level.It would not have been possible without the encouragement of Prof. Julia Sloth-Nielsen, Dean at the Faculty of Law (University of the Western Cape).I am deeply indebted to her for

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.