Africa-Press – Botswana. The Botswana Prisons Service will host the first ever National Reintegration Conference to strengthen partnerships with stakeholders and experts in rehabilitation and reintegration.
Speaking during a stakeholders’ breakfast meeting in Gaborone on Thursday, the Commissioner of Prisons Ms Dinah Marathe, said the conference is scheduled for August 28-29 and President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi is expected to officiate.
“Through the conference, we will also seek to promote community involvement for sustainable reintegration and provide a platform for ex-offenders to share their experiences on rehabilitation and reintegration programmes,” she said.
Ms Marathe said there was need for assistance and ideas from all stakeholders to enable them to achieve their mandate of successfully rehabilitating offenders, which would ultimately result in a peaceful, safer and productive country.
“As an organization tasked with providing a safe custodial care to persons committed to prisons, we need genuine feedback from various stakeholders which we can leverage for growth, and through this conference we expect such feedback,” she said.
Ms Marathe also said for them to achieve their mandate, there was need to review their processes and programmes, hence a decision to reset and reclaim their internal business processes. She indicated that BPS had made some visible footprints in the community as it had among others, established 447 community based reintegration committees.
“To date, prisoners have been handed to these committees that comprises of 450 males and nine females,” she said. However, only eight prisoners among that lot had re-offended, which indicates the effectiveness of the initiative.
She pleaded with members of the community to play their role in ensuring that ex-offenders were welcomed back into the society. Failure to accept the ex-convicts back into society was one of the reasons some of them re-offended.
“We have had cases where even members of the immediate family of ex-offenders were rejecting them, and they ended giving up on life and resorting to the life of crime,” she said.
Rejecting ex-offenders was tantamount to double punishment as they would have already served jail term.
She pleaded with the business community to employ ex-offenders as most of them had been given vocational skills.
“We would even plead with you to lower your requirements to accommodate them,” she pleaded. She encouraged family members to make it a habit to check on convicts at prisons as lack of such could harden them further. She said they were in the process of introducing video visitations to enable remote checking of prisoners, which would come in handy especially if one was incarcerated far from their families.
Ms Marathe explained that they have suspended corporal punishment and reduction of food ration as a way of punishment according to the recommendations of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights but said solitary confinement was still in use as it had not been found to violate one’s rights.
She said the aim of the prisons service was to move from being a punitive to a correctional facility. Various speakers at the meeting commended the institution for its decision to reform, and encouraged it to include ex-offenders in community reintegration committees.
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