A price worth paying?

Origins in prison labour

The first private prisons in South Africa were operated by the De Beers Mining Company. De Beers built the prisons and the state provided the prisoners to fill them. The mining company paid to incarcerate their labourers and also paid the state for the use of their prison labour. By the end of the 19th century, the De Beers Diamond Mining Company was using over 10000 prison labourers daily.

Today's prisons were constructed in an era that did not embrace the rehabilitation ideal but were intended instead to warehouse prisoners as labour commodities. The current shortage of prison space is severe, and many of the existing prisons require significant repair even without the added strain of overcrowding.

However, government's economic strategy calls for reduced government spending. Furthermore, foreign governments and international lending agencies often attach conditions of deficit reduction to loans or aid packages. Thus, private prisons were first considered as an option in South Africa in 1994, although the first contract was not signed until more than five years later.

The myth of prison 'hotels'

The average prison in South Africa is forced to accommodate up to twice its intended capacity (see Crime Index volume 5 number 5, 2001). In the larger prisons, many of the cells intended for 18 are crowded with 50 to 60 inmates. Often there are not enough beds or blankets, and new arrivals must soon learn to align themselves with powerful gang members in order to obtain the basic necessities.

The food provided is also substandard. Usually, a prisoner in South Africa is given breakfast of mielie pap and then dinner and lunch are combined into an afternoon meal at 15h00. This meal usually consists of ground fish meal and several slices of bread. Meat, fruit, and vegetables are scarce, but even the food that does arrive at the prison is smuggled and stolen so that it can be sold to the highest bidder.

Most prisoners are poor and so the medium of exchange becomes sexual favours. This results in victimisation, if not outright assaults, between prisoners and the situation is only made worse by the increasing overcrowding and decreasing availability of basic provisions.

Given the enormous demand for public services, most notably health and education, it is understandable that the Department of Correctional Services (DCS) is not likely to receive the necessary infusion of capital to reform and refurbish its operations and facilities. For these reasons, DCS began to explore the options for involving the private sector.

In 1997, then Minister of Correctional Services, Dr. Sipo Mzimela, visited the United States and the United Kingdom in order to learn more about their prison systems. After his trip, Mzimela concluded that "wherever the private sector got involved, they have delivered a better service, and have done it at less cost to the taxpayer."

Problems of cost comparisons

The first private prison opened in Bloemfontein in July 2001, and the second will open in Louis Trichardt in early 2002. The first contract, with Ikhwezi Bloemfontein Correctional Contracts (BCC), is to design, finance, build, and manage a 3 024 bed facility in Grootvlei, Bloemfontein. The second contract is with South African Custodial Services (SACS), a consortium that includes Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. The sites were chosen because DCS already owned sufficient land in these two areas, as both are adjacent to existing prisons.

The total cost of the BCC contract is R1 764 644 196 and the expected cost per ‘bed’ is R66.04 per day. The government claims that the BCC cost is a saving of 4.86% from the DCS cost per prisoner per day. In truth, these cost comparisons are meaningless:

DCS determines its cost per prison per day by taking its annual budget and dividing it by the number of prisoners in custody. The annual DCS budget does not contain all the costs associated with running a prison. Most significantly, the cost of the facilities is included in the budget of the Department of Public Works.



The prison service is increasingly being used to house prisoners awaiting trial when these should actually be the charges of the departments responsible for courts and policing.



The great majority of costs incurred by the DCS are for fixed overheads, both in terms of personnel salaries and general sunken costs. These are costs that do not vary with the size of the prison population, and as such should be treated differently when making cost comparisons. For example, the head of a prison will be paid a salary, regardless of whether his prison has the designated 1 000 prisoners it was intended to accommodate, or whether it is at 200% capacity and crowded with 2 000 prisoners. The cost per prisoner for the head of prison’s salary will be cut in half when there are 2 000 prisoners as compared to when there are 1 000 prisoners. This does not represent an actual cost saving. The same holds true with all fixed costs in the DCS budget. These costs will be considerably less when divided by the number of prisoners because they are not increased by a rise in the prison population.

A better means of comparison can be found when one compares the variable costs. A variable cost is one that changes with volume. For example, the cost of issuing each prisoner a blanket will increase as more prisoners enter the prison system. If, suppose, a blanket costs R10, then DCS will have to spend R10 000 on blankets at a prison with 1 000 prisoners. If the prison has 2 000 prisoners it will need 2 000 blankets and the costs increase to R20 000.

Assuming the total costs for providing correctional services – and not just the DCS annual budget – could be captured, and that these costs could be divided into categories of fixed and variable costs, it is still unlikely that an appropriate cost comparison could be made.

For example, the BCC prison is designed for 3 024 prisoners. Westville Medium B has approximately 2 700 prisoners. The prisoners at BCC will be in cells designed for either two or four prisoners. Westville Medium B has an average of 48 prisoners per cell, where most cells were designed for 18 prisoners. At BCC, the prisoners will be unlocked from 07h30 each morning until 19h30 each night and will be fed three times a day. At Westville the prisoners will be unlocked from 07h30 until 15h30, and are fed twice a day. Clearly, standard of care is not comparable between the two facilities and so cost comparisons become meaningless.

The cost of humane detention

Perhaps the greatest contribution the BCC prison will make to correctional services in South Africa is that for the first time the government will learn exactly how much it costs to provide conditions of humane detention for prisoners. Private prisons will necessarily be an improvement on public prisons because it would be almost impossible to perform any worse.

It should be pointed out that many of the officials and employees of DCS are hardworking and devoted civil servants who deserve to be commended for their efforts in strenuous and stressful conditions. The impact of justice department backlogs and a lack of resources have significantly contributed to the current state of the public prison system. These are factors beyond the control of even the most senior DCS official. That being said, the fact remains that conditions in South African prisons are deplorable and the private sector cannot but be an improvement.

The advent of private prisons in South Africa has come in response to the main purpose for which privatisation was intended: the government needs help. The prisons in South Africa are full of hard working and dedicated staff, but their morale is crumbling along with the buildings in which they work.

Prisoners are kept in substandard conditions that violate every single right guaranteed to prisoners in the South African constitution. Nothing could be worse than the current state of the prison system, but existing resources appear insufficient to fix it. The demand for private sector involvement is real and not fabricated by any special interest lobby or prison-industrial complex. It can only be hoped that prison privatisation can offer a real solution.

KC Goyer
University of Natal, Durban
goyer@nu.ac.za

Source documents

J van Heerden, Prison health care in South Africa, University of Cape Town, 1996.

Trade Union Research Project (TURP), Privatisation in prisons and prison service: The international experience, Report to POPCRU, Johannesburg, 30 June 2000.

For further reading about private prisons see KC Goyer, Prison privatisation in South Africa: Issues, challenges and opportunities, ISS Monograph series, No. 64, September 2001.