Addressing Parliament’s correctional services committee, Gideon said in 1997 6674 prisoners were involved in agriculture but last year there were only 2210.

The MPs on the committee stressed that the slowdown in activity on the farms and in the workshops meant that vital mechanisms for training prisoners for the day of their release were not working well. The loss of revenue from the sale of produce affects correctional services because it has to pay for food that it used to produce for itself.

“Fruit production has dropped from 611000kg to 558000kg, and eggs from 1,1-million dozen to 1,08-million dozen , while red meat and vegetable production had increased marginally . "Achieving self sufficiency necessitates the setting up of industries, prison farms and prison factories. Business principles are concerned with continuously improved production through innovation and reductions in cost and waste in order to maintain profits,” Morris said.

He said they are not saying as an organisation that prisons should become profitable but its there interpretation of the act, “the department has a statutory obligation to use industries and the prison labour at its disposal to achieve self-sufficiency, which could save the taxpayer billions of rands,"

Morris said. "We must ask why more is not being done to increase self-sufficiency or production in our prison workshops. Thousands of prisoners are still not involved in any work opportunities but sit idle in prison making no contribution to their own upkeep."

ANC chairman of the committee Dennis Bloem and Democratic Alliance MP James Selfe immediately turned the question back on to Morris, asking him for his opinion on the reasons for the decline. Morris said that the conditions for increased production were better than ever.

There was a better prisoner to official ratio and the escape rate was one of the lowest in the world. The department was focusing on the wrong things, concentrating, for instance, on security fencing despite the low escape rate.

Bloem said the committee wanted to send a strong message to the department that prisoners would work and work hard. He said sexual abuses such as the practice of turning new prisoners into "wives" were thriving in an atmosphere where prisoners sat around doing nothing for 23 out of 24 hours.

Those in state of the art production workshops had declined to 1757 from 2359 10 years earlier. However, the cost of housing the prisoners will soar to R15bn in the 2010-11 financial year, and the prisoners' contribution will be at an all-time low.


Keywords: south_africa argiculture