Although it won’t solve South Africa’s entire high unemployment rate, this idea will go some way in ensuring that we inject more jobs into our economy.
South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world. Fact! Crime though is just the by-product of the real product itself – criminals.
And what it comes to that, we have oodles.
Our current prison system is already overcrowded and has been for some time now. Every Freedom Day, our president gives ‘presidential pardons’ to a number of convicted criminals only to find that so many of those pardoned, are committing the same or worse crimes again within weeks of their release.
Clearly we shouldn’t be pardoning these hardened thugs. It’s almost as if there is no selection criteria in place and the annual pardon is nothing more than a blanket, one-size-fits-all, percentage game which chops the overcrowding numbers per each prison.
To make matters worse, more criminals are entering our prison system daily.
So instead of releasing repeat offenders because of overcrowding, let’s rather budget for increasing the capacity of our prison systems across the country.
The way I see it, there are several advantages to doing this:
- We create employment during the construction of these facilities.
- We create employment for prison warders and general staff who’ll be needed to manage and run each prison.
- We increase our capacity to hold more criminals so that South Africa becomes a safer place for all.
It’s a win-win situation for all of us.
Of course, our national budget needs to cater for expense, but it’s nothing that cannot be addressed if we root out corruption so that more funds become available.
If we had the death sentence, which I’m in favour of, we could put the serial rapists and murderers out of their misery and rid our society of that rot for good.
But until then, let’s build more prisons!
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