South African prisons are dangerously overcrowded according to evidence recently given to the Hoexter Commission investigating the legal system. The causes are the system of pass laws, and an increase in the number of long-term prisoners, according to a legal expert and a criminologist.
The shortage of room in prisons, felt for 30 years, results from a daily prison population of 102,000 against available accommodation for 70,606.
The latest statistics show that nearly half-a-million people were jailed during 1978/79 including 200,000 short term prisoners. Most of the short term prisoners were offenders against pass laws, trespassers and curfew breakers.
Commenting on the figures and reasons for the growing prison population, Professor Wiechers the head of the Constitutional Law Faculty at the University of South Africa said that it was because of the pass law regulations and the way they were applied, that so many Africans were arrested every year. He said that only a complete change in the system would end the overcrowding of prisons.
