Escapees Stream Out of South Africa’s Prisons

“We are out for Christmas,” the handwritten message said. “We will be back on Jan. 3, 1998.”

The notice, posted on a window in the coal mining town of Vryheid, could pass as word from just another merchant closing shop during South Africa’s peak summer season--except the window has iron bars and the authors are suspected murderers, rapists and armed robbers.

The 15 prisoners escaped from the Vryheid jail late in November, using a broken bedpost to pry apart a window grille and then leaving their mocking farewell. The jailbirds are among an estimated 800 detainees who have shaken off South African police and prison authorities in the past eight weeks, an astonishingly ordinary tally for this country’s hemorrhaging criminal justice system.

“We will be waiting for them on Saturday,” said Philemon Ntuli, a corrections official in KwaZulu-Natal province, where the jail is located. “But I don’t believe they will show.”

The year-end holiday season here is traditionally one of number-crunching as officials doggedly log traffic deaths on South Africa’s notoriously unsafe roads. Now prison and jail breakouts have come to rival car wrecks as the country’s morbid New Year obsession: Preliminary statistics show 1997 keeping pace with 1996, when a record 26 people a day escaped custody or assisted in a getaway.

Comparable data in the United States--which has a prison population eight times that of South Africa--show an average of 32 escapes or unauthorized absences a day in 1996, according to state and federal statistics compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute, an agency of the U.S. Justice Department.

Overcrowded jails, incompetent and corrupt law enforcement officials and a severe shortage of police officers and prison guards are the biggest contributors to South Africa’s jailbreak problem, according to criminologists and human rights groups.

The Department of Correctional Services is shy about 6,000 staff members nationwide; the South African Police Service, meanwhile, is losing employees at a rate of 3,000 a year, and its officers have become a prime target of criminals, with 119 killed during the first half of 1997.

“The people have had enough,” said Mandla Nxumalo, national coordinator of the South African Stop Child Abuse organization. “The police must wake up. The government must wake up. People are demanding answers here and now.”

Nxumalo joined the chorus of outrage this week over the latest shocking jailbreak, the case of an accused child rapist and killer who slipped away from a psychiatric hospital where he had been sent for pretrial evaluation. Dan Mabote, 30, is charged with murdering a 7-year-old girl who was scheduled to testify against him in a multiple rape case. At the time of the girl’s killing, Mabote was free on bail; this time, security was so lax at the state hospital that police only learned of his escape a day later.

In what has become a predictable routine, police, prison and health officials have blamed one another for the lapse, and despairing ordinary citizens are threatening to take the law into their own hands.

“The community is very angry,” said Nxumalo, who lives in Soweto, the sprawling black suburb of Johannesburg. “I am afraid if they find him, they will kill him.”

Mabote’s escape is only the most recent in a series of high-profile gaffes that have plagued authorities this year.

In early December, six newly detained criminals escaped from an overcrowded prison in Pretoria after overpowering guards and hijacking a getaway vehicle; two other would-be escapees were left behind only because there was not enough room in the car.

A few days later, a convicted murderer and rapist walked out of the same Pretoria prison after Sunday church services by tagging along with church organizers.

In late November, Jan van der Westhuizen, a suspected serial killer, escaped from custody for the seventh time by sawing through the bars of his Pretoria police cell with a smuggled hacksaw blade. The 26-year-old career criminal--picked up by police four days later--reportedly escaped 35 times from reformatories as a teenager.

And earlier this year, Josiah “Mr. Fingers” Rabotapi escaped while being transferred from a Johannesburg court to prison. It was the third breakout in as many years for the well-known bank robber, who is the alleged leader of a multimillion-dollar armed-robbery syndicate. He is still on the run.

“The department is regularly confronted with daring, ingenious and desperate escapes,” said Russel Mamabolo, spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services. “The severe conditions and overcrowding in prisons are putting a tremendous strain on the security and management of the department.”

The situation has grown so serious that President Nelson Mandela, who typically stays away from the daily fray of governing, called a high-level Cabinet meeting several weeks ago to knock heads and get greater coordination among his ministers.

“The cooperation between all of the structures in the criminal justice system is appallingly low, and they have an adversarial attitude toward one another,” said Wilfrid Schaerf, director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town. “There is an attitude that as long as the nonsense happens in some other bureaucracy--as long as one’s own slate is clean--who cares if the criminal is back out on the street?”

The wave of escapes and a correspondingly exorbitant rate of violent crime have led to a popular outcry for everything from the reinstitution of the death penalty to the housing of hardened criminals in the darkest depths of exhausted gold mines.

In September, government officials unveiled their latest answer to the problem: a high-security wing at the main Pretoria prison dubbed CMAX, or closed-maximum-security unit. The facility, inspired by prisons in the United States, is designed for the country’s worst offenders, including chronic escapees.

Among its first inmates is Sylvester Mofokeng, a serial killer who murdered 12 of his victims after escaping from prison in 1995, and Eugene de Kock, a former apartheid-era covert hit squad commander who has been convicted of multiple murders. Inmates are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and are not allowed to smoke, watch television or have physical contact with visitors.

The idea, prison officials said, is to make confinement so miserable that hardened criminals will think twice about escaping or causing other problems. Four “super-maximum prisons,” based on the CMAX principle, are on the drawing board as well.

But critics say building tougher prisons is not the answer. Government statistics show that only 30% of escapes actually occur from prisons, with the vast majority coming during police detention or transport--and with a high degree of insider complicity or indifference.

“From the prisoners’ perspective, there is sadly a viewpoint, but not necessarily a justification, for escaping custody,” said Mogam Moodliar of the South African Human Rights Commission, a government-funded watchdog group.

In the case of the 15 prisoners in Vryheid, their reasons for fleeing were detailed in a second note left in their prison cell. The inmates, most of whom had been in detention nearly two years and were still awaiting trial, complained of being “dissatisfied with the slow pace” of the justice system. “We are sorry that we are escaping from prison, it was never our intention,” they wrote.