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Former president Jacob Zuma. (Photo by Jerome Delay / POOL / AFP)

Zuma unable to stomach his own medicine

There is irony in Msholozi being forced under the heel of the monstrous correctional services system he propped up – will he return behind bars?

Thabo Bester escaped from his prison cell — by faking his death in the form of a mysterious burnt corpse specially brought in for the purpose. Photo: Supplied

Thabo Bester’s escape shows how privatising harms crime control

We should question the issue of prison outsourcing when the motive is profit and not public safety

Late on Sunday 5 March, four prisoners escaped from the central prison in Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania, killing two soldiers in the process.

Is the idea of rehabilitation redundant in South Africa?

Without the political incentive for fundamental economic change, the fortunes and possibilities for rehabilitation of ex-offenders will not, and cannot, change

Buddies: The national commissioner of correctional services, Arthur Fraser, should have recused himself from the decision whether Jacob Zuma should get medical parole given his history at the State Security Agency and with the former president. Photo: Felix Dlangamandla/Netwerk24

Fraser saves Zuma from prison – again

The correctional services commissioner (and former spy boss tied to state capture) overruled the medical board’s dismissal of the former president’s application for parole

Profitable: The prison-industrial complex succeeded in South Africa because of state capture.
(Michele Spatari/AFP)

The incarceration of Jacob Zuma is poetic justice

During his tenure as president he enabled state capture and the building of the prison industrial complex

Former public protector Thuli Madonsela says intelligence agency opened documents couriered to her by the department of international relations. (Photo by Esa Alexander/Sunday Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

Peacemaking criminology as ubuntu: A reply to Thuli Madonsela

If the rich and powerful are afforded amnesty, then so too must the poor who are often pushed into lives of crime

Kgosi Mampuru sources claimed that negligence was rife at the facility, resulting in the suspicious deaths of inmates, as well as the brazen escape of 9 December 2020.  (Oupa Nkosi, M&G)

Merchants of despair

When imprisonment becomes a business, the profit motive rears its head at the expense of the good of the prisoners. Three recent books deal with the murky workings of the…