The main objective in sending a convicted person to a correctional centre is to rehabilitate and reform the offender to make them realize what they did was unlawful and unacceptable in human living norms or the constitution.
Correctional centres should be a place of safety and security but instead they are places of terror and mischief. Gangs rule this little and dangerous world in South Africa called Correctional centres.
Most people who enter correctional centres for the first time are not hardened criminals but rather people who made mistakes due to the treatment the receive when they are newbies in centres from other offenders who are members of the groups or gangs that rule every correctional centre in South Africa and are referred to as the numbers.
The numbers are the group of notorious and dangers criminals either the 26's or the 28's who have joint leadership in running the centres all over South Africa. The gangs have been around in South African correctional centres for decades and have survived by recruiting new offenders by means of persuasion and bad treatment of new offenders including assaulting, robbing and raping new offenders. The correctional centre officials are unable to end this because their authority ends in the passages and on the cells its a no go area.
The offenders cheat and manipulate officials by bribing them with money and asking them to bring them illegal things in correctional centres from the outside for example Drugs, weapons and cellphones.
Those who are leaders of the gangs live a luxurious lives like kings as they command everything done in the cells and the centres. Every member of the gangs live a very low cost life in the inside, buying everything cheap.
The prices of food and clothes in the centres brought by mischief and stealing.
Loaf of Bread: R3
Piece of meat: R2
An Egg: 30c
Litre of Milk:R1
Toilet paper: Free
Converse sneakers: R15
And many things found in correctional centres at low cost others free of charge...
Other people who go back and forth becoming jail birds are being attracted by the life of free things in the inside and running away from the high cost of living in the outside. To them it feels like the only solution to the hardships they face everyday in their everyday lives.
The only way we can fight this as citizens is by accepting ex-offenders into our communities and make them feel like human beings again not animals.
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