Apart from the budgeting process being opaque to most citizens, the political priorities in the national budget can quickly negate the needs of those rendered invisible in our societies. Persons confined to prisons are least able to influence budgetary processes, yet they are most affected by it since they are entirely at the mercy of the State for their daily survival.
According to World Prison Brief data, there are approximately 398,206 persons in prisons across the SADC region, with about 40% in South African prisons. It is, therefore, critical to ensure that prisons have adequate budgets to pay staff, maintain infrastructure, feed inmates, and provide adequate medical, educational, recreational, rehabilitation and reintegration services. This should not be a once-off process, and parliaments must be ready to respond to urgent needs.
As a first step, parliamentarians need to visit prisons to understand their budgetary needs. In Malawi, the Parliamentary Committees on Legal Affairs and Social and Community Affairs visited prisons in 2022 after they received reports that inmates were not receiving food. This led to the Malawi parliament increasing the prison food budget and ringfencing it in its 2022/23 Mid-Year National Budget review sitting and allocating funding to prison farms.
Not everyone in prison has been convicted of a crime. Many are in prison awaiting trial due to backlogs in the criminal justice system that are not of their doing, often for years. Others are in prison because they cannot pay their debts or afford the amount set for bail or the fine imposed. Some are in prison for offences which criminalise their poverty or status. Many are imprisoned even though they ought to have been eligible for diversion or a non-custodial sentence due to the lack of funding to support diversion, legal aid and parole. Housing people in overcrowded conditions violates their fundamental rights.
The Democratic Republic of Congo had an estimated 44 536 inmates in 2023 and an occupancy rate of 322,8%. Pre-trial detention is estimated to account for around 80% of the prison population in the DRC. Severe overcrowding and insufficient prison budgets mean that inmates often die of malnutrition. The United Nations and courts have pointed out that such deaths would not have occurred had the criminal justice system worked properly and had there been sufficient inspections of prisons by the judiciary and other actors to ensure that illegal detention and malnutrition issues are attended to.
In 2022, Mozambique announced an ambitious plan to reduce prison overcrowding by building more prisons. Building more prisons, however, often just increases the number of inmates a country has to feed. In 2024, it was reported that Mozambique spent $250,000 a day to feed inmates. Also, focusing on reducing the number of inmates by avoiding overcrowding, removing mandatory minimum sentences, and repealing outdated and discriminatory offences makes budgetary sense.
It has been shown that alternatives to detention, including diversion and restorative justice methods, are more cost-efficient than prisons, where the bulk of budgets are spent on infrastructure and staffing, and even then, infrastructures are crumbling, and staff are overburdened. Large infrastructure projects to rehabilitate prison infrastructure are often large budget line items that do not always lead to improvements in inmates’ lives. Parliamentary oversight on how prison budgets are spent is essential to ensure the money allocated is used to maintain international prison standards.
Parliamentarians can learn from the developments in countries like Kenya and Ghana, where prison enterprises provided prisoners with skills and supplemented the prison’s budget. Countries like Zambia and Malawi use prison farms to try to source food for prisons. Still, prison industries could also be diversified to provide a range of other skills to prisoners as part of the prison’s rehabilitation programme. Again, such projects would also need sufficient oversight to ensure inmates aren’t engaged in forced labour or that the income received from the work goes towards improving prison conditions and assisting inmates.
Prison staff often have the same training as other civil servants but receive lower salaries and live and work in appalling conditions. Ensuring fair labour conditions at correctional facilities and retaining professional staff requires funding.
Budgeting adequately for prisons and alternatives to detention is a human rights issue and part of the State’s duty of care towards those it chooses to incarcerate. Parliamentary oversight of prison budgets and their utilisation is essential to protect the rights of inmates who deserve accountability.
Anneke Meerkotter, Executive Director, Southern Africa Litigation Centre
