Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-21

THOMAS MANTHATA: Doctor van Heerden could I please request something, we have got the submission and time being of essence, is it possible for you to answer a few questions?

DR VAN HEERDEN: Sure.

THOMAS MANTHATA: From your submission you have case studies and I find in your case studies that most of the cases are of common-law prisoners nature except this one of ... (interrupted)

DR VAN HEERDEN: No, no you're making a mistake.  The case studies were all of political people and they were young people who were put in amongst common-law criminals which was against the Declaration of the State of Emergency.

THOMAS MANTHATA: They were political prisoners themselves?

DR VAN HEERDEN: They were themselves political prisoners.

THOMAS MANTHATA: Thank you.  It is not too clear to draw this distinction between health care and custodial care, more especially in a situation where it seems those who are doing custodial care seem to be more influential and they seem to direct terms on those who do health care and in the end it becomes a little confusing, how health care can be seen as perhaps independent of custodial care.

DR VAN HEERDEN: It is my belief that the only way that health care will be practiced as it should be practiced, is that health care must be separated completely from custodial care and that everybody that has any role to play as a health care provider, whether that be a so-called medical orderly and they're now called nursing assistants or a nurse or a doctor should be appointed, paid and responsible to the Department of Health.  In actual fact the Department of Health should take full responsibility for all health care in places of custodial care and in that I include police stations as I think that's crucial that the police stations be included.

THOMAS MANTHATA: Where do you place private health care that is, where a prisoner can, like it's sometimes said that when you want care from outside from private doctors it becomes so expensive that most of the prisoners may not be able to afford that and yet it is very important because that's to me the only way we can have the prisons be as transparent as possible.

DR VAN HEERDEN: I think that it should be a prisoner's right to ask for a private doctor.  In actual fact as you mention, it's very difficult for prisoners to get private care because the majority of them don't have the finances.  Once a person sees his private doctor and one assumes that they have some sort of relationship with their doctor, I don't think in this instance the custodial authorities interfere if it is practiced in the way where people see their doctors in private.  I actually think if one wants transparency there are other ways of obtaining transparency.  I think that the prisons should be opened to scrutiny and visits by the lay public.  I think that there should be independent bodies appointed to visit and monitor prison conditions like for instance Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons I Britain, that that person be appointed by and responsible to Parliament.  Definitely an independent monitoring body must not be responsible to the prison authorities.

THOMAS MANTHATA: My last question, I don't know whether in this case we confining ourselves largely to political prisoners or are we talking about prisons as a whole because one of the biggest problems we are faced with in South African Prisons is this gangsterism.

DR VAN HEERDEN: Beg your pardon?

THOMAS MANTHATA: Gangs, gangsterism in prisons.

DR VAN HEERDEN: Well I agree with you, the work the guy did was with political prisoners because I think that the information that one got from the political prisoners was better digested information, they had workshops on these things, they had written petitions, they had thought about the whole human rights issue which is not something that common-law prisoners normally do.  The information that I gathered was used to make recommendations for all people in custodial care.  What did you want me to answer?

THOMAS MANTHATA: Gangsterism.

DR VAN HEERDEN: I can't speak for the other Provinces, I really just know the Cape Province and I know especially in the Western Cape that gangsterism rules the prisons, it rules the prison authorities, it rules the people that come in, it rules what happens outside of prisons and I think one of the only things one could try and do, is to treat people better so that they go out of prison and perhaps to train them better so that when they leave prison, they leave prison with more self esteem and an ability to maintain themselves and work for themselves rather than to be sucked into the prisons.  The whole issue of breaking the cycle of control of gangs inside and outside of prisons of which both the police at times and certainly the prison warders are part, is going to be very, very difficult to break and it's been functioning in our country now for over a century, so it's not something we're going to change overnight.

THOMAS MANTHATA: The more we seem to liberalize the prisons, the more we see prisoners breaking out of prisons and this seems to be on the increase lately.

DR VAN HEERDEN: I don't whether treating people decently, what I mean by decently is by greeting people, giving them your name, speaking to them politely, whether listening to their complaints and giving them care when they're ill as we heard this morning people weren't given, whether that in actual fact makes it easier for people to escape from prison.  I myself can't see it, I think there are other things about the criminal justice system that one needs to look at but I don't think it has anything to do with people's rights to health care and to decent treatment or humane treatment.

THOMAS MANTHATA: Thank you, over to the Chairperson.

DR BORAINE: Doctor van Heerden thank you very much indeed for your presentation, I know that you haven't even finished what you had hoped to say but unfortunately we have even gone over the time and there are other people we have to hear today because they were promised they would be.  We have your complete submission that will be incorporated in our report, in our final report and it just remains for me to thank you for doing an impossible job extraordinarily well, thank you very much for your help.