Pretoria - As learners enter the second week of the 2014 school year, inmates across the country are registering for various educational and skills programmes.
Correctional Services Minister Sibusiso Ndebele has called on the heads of South Africa's 243 correctional centres to encourage every inmate to participate in such programmes.
"The Department of Correctional Services (DCS) is implementing programmes aimed at turning around the lives of those who wronged society so that upon release, they are ideal, productive, law-abiding citizens. Inmates must work and study, and leave correctional centres with a skill in one hand and a certificate in the other hand.
“The hand that was used to harm others must be changed into a hand which now builds and heals. The trilogy of victim-offender-community is central to all rehabilitation," Ndebele said.
DCS has increased the number of full-time correctional centre schools from only one in 2009 to 12 in 2013. This year (2014), three additional schools are scheduled for accreditation including Rustenburg, Boksburg and Ekuseni Youth Centres.
Last year, the minister announced that, as from 1 April 2013, it is compulsory for every inmate, without a qualification equivalent to Grade 9, to complete Adult Education and Training (AET) level 1 to 4.
Between April and September 2013, 11 649 inmates registered for AET programmes. From 2010 to 2013, 73 881 inmates participated in educational programmes.
Over the past two years (2012/13), 559 inmates wrote Grade 9 to 11 examinations, with an average pass rate of 73% in 2013. – SAnews.gov.za
