Pretoria – The Department of Justice and Correctional Services is expected to fill all vacant posts that exist in the department this financial year.
The vacant posts include the posts of National Commissioner, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Deputy Commissioner of Strategic Management and the Regional Commissioners of Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West.
Delivering his Budget Vote speech on Wednesday, Minister Michael Masutha said he will ensure that his department functions at full capacity.
Human capital, modernisation of correctional services
“We have planned to also train an average of 16 500 officials each year in line with the Workplace Skills Plan to gear the Department of Correctional Services for a heightened delivery of services over the next five years and beyond,” he said.
The minister said alongside human capital focus, will be the modernisation of the correctional system in order to provide a reliable, integrated and secured information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and system.
This, according to Minister Masutha, will include an Integrated Inmate Management System for a single-view of inmate and offender information based on biometric identification of inmates and offenders to curtail instances of identity fraud and erroneous releases.
Video-conferencing system
Minister Masutha also announced that in November 2014 his department expects to launch a video-conferencing system in all 53 Correctional Supervision and Parole Board (CSPB) offices in South Africa.
“This innovation is intended to help reduce the barriers of participation in the parole hearings like physical distance and language barriers to our efforts of centralising victims in the determination of offender parole hearings.
“With this video conferencing capacity, built with funding from the Criminal Asset Recovery Account (CARA), victims can be informed to go to their nearest CSPB offices and be linked to the actual parole board hearings,” he said. – SAnews.gov.za
