Parly committee to up pressure on DCS to stop cellphones, contraband being smuggled into prisons

Parliament’s correctional services portfolio committee says it will up the pressure on the department to stop cellphones and other contraband from being smuggled into prisons.

Chairperson of the portfolio committee, Anthea Ramolobeng, said that officials collaborating with prisoners must be criminally charged, while inmates must face additional charges.

Testifying before Parliament’s ad hoc committee into police corruption last week, former minister Bheki Cele said the committee had to probe prisons, where much of the country’s violent crime was being planned.

At a briefing in Parliament on Monday, Ramolobeng said that while on recent oversight visits to prisons in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape, officials claimed that body scanners and other security measures did not always work properly.

Ramolobeng said the department must make its security systems foolproof. 

"Those who are found with contraband in correctional facilities, whether officials assisting in smuggling or inmates who are found, they must be criminally charged."

The committee has also requested the department to explore ways of blocking cellphone signals in prisons.

"Either way, they find a way of having contraband with them, [but] they [should be] unable to use them. But whilst you don’t also affect the residential area around them, equally affect the running of the facility."

Ramolobeng said the committee was also advocating for more unannounced raids in prisons.

Between April and September this year, 786 cellphones were discovered in St Albans prison in Gqeberha.