The Globalization of Supermax Prisons

Chapter 7. Supermaximum Prisons in South Africa

80 Chapter 7 Supermaximum Prisons in South Africa Fran Buntman and Lukas Muntingh Since democratization, South Africa has struggled with serious crime at unprecedented levels. As Anthony Altbeker (2007, 12) notes, “[E]very piece of reliable data we have tells us that South Africa ranks at the very top of the world’s league tables for violent crime. . . . [It is] an exceptionally, possibly uniquely, violent society.” Concern about crime cuts across boundaries of race, class, urban-rural residence, age, religion , linguistics, and other divides in South Africa. It is therefore hard to fathom how public calls for being tough on crime, which rose in the 1990s, could not have affected the environment in which C-Max, the first supermaximum prison in South Africa, was developed. (Ebongweni was the country’s second supermaximum institution.) The link was not, however, narrow or causal. The South African history of supermaximum prisons has several dimensions . Department of Correctional Services (DCS) officials were concerned about unacceptably high levels of prison violence and escapes, for which they blamed a small category of severely disruptive prisoners. Democratization and, more specifically, the establishment of the rule of law and human rights principles (in direct challenge to apartheid’s history) both facilitated the supermaximum approaches and tried to pull this security experiment back from its most regressive, retributivist, and harsh tendencies. The government sent “tough-on-crime” messages at points, and C-Max and later Ebongweni were part of that. This chapter reviews this multidimensional history, discussing key aspects of these two supermaximum-security prisons. Neither of these facilities is in a healthy state. Human rights violations and security breaches have pockmarked their history. Despite sophisticated infrastructure and detailed regimes meant to promote both security and rehabilitation, the human factor—from Supermaximum Prisons in South Africa 81 resource allocation to corruption in the DCS—emerges as the soft underbelly of these two prisons. Overview and Profile Almost all South African correctional centers (formerly referred to as prisons) are designated one of three security levels: minimum, medium, and maximum security.1 Two centers, however, are even more secure and restrictive than maximum-security facilities. These two supermaximum-security prisons house adult males, predominantly sentenced, who have been identified as being disruptive and violent in the general prison population.2 C-Max, which stands for closed maximum-security prison, is the first of these. It is located in a section of Pretoria’s Central Prison in the Pretoria management area, which includes a cluster of correctional centers and was opened in September 1997 (South African Institute of Race Relations [SAIRR] 1997–1998, 71).3 C-Max was converted from the former death row following the Constitutional Court’s 1995 State v. Makwanyane decision declaring the death penalty unconstitutional. The second is Ebongweni, situated in the remote southern KwaZulu-Natal town of Kokstad. Ebongweni was specifically created and designed as a large supermaximum-security prison.4 It was planned before C-Max, but numerous delays in Ebongweni’s planning and construction meant that C-Max became operational first.5 The supermaximum-security prison is part of a broader complex including a medium-security prison (in part to provide labor for the supermaximum facility) and a housing complex (Sigcau 2002). When C-Max opened in 1997, DCS said it would be used for South Africa’s most dangerous and violent criminals, escapees, and prisoners who had violated prison regulations. F. J. Venter, a staff officer in the commissioner ’s office at the time DCS began the move to supermaximum facilities, underscored that the most important requirement for admission to supermaximum facilities was the commission of crimes in prison.6 Prisoners who commit violent crimes against officials or whose behavior does not improve following a pattern of increased institutional control elsewhere are potential candidates for transfer to a supermaximum facility ( Jali 2006, 354).7 These criteria are important for the safety of both inmates and staff in prison and because rehabilitative programming cannot occur in a violent environment. Consequently, high-ranking members of prison gangs are also prime candidates for transfer to supermax. When addressing the Parliamentary Correctional Services Portfolio Committee, DCS added that supermaximum facilities would have a deterrent value for others in the prison system (“PMG Report” 1998). Soon after C-Max was created, DCS estimated supermaximum prisons were needed for about 50 percent of the country’s 7,000 “most dangerous” inmates, mostly those who continued to commit crime...