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Almost every prisoner will eventually leave prison. The question is whether that release happens suddenly, at the end of a sentence, with no supervision at all, or whether it happens in a controlled way, with rules, monitoring, and consequences.

A parole system is the process by which some prisoners are released before the end of their full sentence, but only under strict conditions and supervision. A parolee is therefore not supposed to be a free citizen in the ordinary sense. They are meant to report to correctional authorities, live at an approved address, obey movement restrictions, avoid further crime, attend rehabilitation programmes, and comply with the conditions set for their release.

A good parole system therefore serves several purposes. It helps manage the movement from prison back into society. It encourages discipline and good behaviour inside prison. It supports rehabilitation by linking release to work, training, remorse, and conduct. It protects the public by making release conditional rather than automatic. It also allows prison space to be focused on the most dangerous offenders.

That is the theory. South Africa’s problem is that too much of the system has stopped working in practice.

South Africa does have a parole system. Offenders become eligible after serving part of their sentence. Their cases are considered by parole boards. Factors such as the original crime, conduct in prison, rehabilitation, risk to the public, the views of victims, and the offender’s proposed address and support network are meant to be considered. If parole is granted, the offender is released into the community under supervision.

But a parole system only works if the state can enforce its own conditions. That is where South Africa has run into serious trouble.

An investigation by amaBhungane, an independent investigative journalism organisation, revealed the scale of the problem. It reported that South African officials could not account for just fewer than 30 000 parolees released from prison since 1991. AmaBhungane reported that more than half of the missing offenders were archived absconders, released between 1991 and 2004, who were never traced and rearrested. The Depafrtment of Correctional Services has disputed parts of the reporting and has said that tracing has not been abandoned, but no one disputes that at least a significant share of the archived absconders did not pass through an appropriate supervision process.

The amaBhungane report identified a serious weakness in the parole system. It said the South African Police Service and Correctional Services systems are not properly integrated. If a parole absconder is arrested again, parole officials may not automatically know. If police encounter a parole absconder, they may not immediately see that the person has disappeared from correctional supervision.

The report further alleged that dedicated tracking and tracing units were done away with around 2018. Correctional Services disputes aspects of this allegation insofar as the suggestion is made that tracing was abandoned entirely. But again, no one disputes that the extent of post-release supervision is not thorough or effective enough.

The department’s own figures show a stretched system. Correctional Services has said it has 1 764 officials supervising 52 772 parolees and probationers. At the same time, the prison system remains overcrowded, with the department saying prisons are 58% overcrowded.

A temptation in that latter percentage, to be resisted, is that parole is used as a pressure valve to alleviate overcrowding. If the purpose of parole becomes reducing the number of people behind bars, the system will release people for the wrong reason.

Sources who spoke to The Common Sense said that Correctional Services Minister Pieter Groenewald is driving a series of reforms to fix the parole system. The minister himself told The Common Sense that he would prefer internal processes to play out before commenting.

A first reform is for parole to be denied to anyone assessed as a medium or high risk of reoffending.

A second reform is to strengthen parole boards with independent specialists such as psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists. Risk assessment requires proper expertise. This is especially true for violent offenders, sexual offenders, repeat offenders, gang-linked offenders, and offenders with serious behavioural problems.

A third reform, which has attracted particular interest from experts, is electronic monitoring and the integration of the police’s and prisons’ monitoring systems with that. Electronic bracelets are an efficient means, for a staffing- and budget-stressed department, to know where parolees are, whether they are obeying movement restrictions, and whether they have breached the conditions of release.

Various expert reports show that electronic monitoring is very effective to reduce monitoring and tracing costs, inspire confidence in parole among the public, relieve prison overcrowding, lower taxpayer costs compared to incarceration, and reduce reoffending by encouraging rehabilitation while parolees remain connected to their families and communities.

A fourth reform reportedly in the works is the use of dedicated tracing teams to hunt down absconders. A parolee who absconds must know that the state will come looking. If he does not believe that, then the conditions attached to parole have little meaning.

A related parallel applies to victims. A family that has already suffered from violent crime should not have to live with the fear that the offender has been released and then lost by the state. Victims must be able to trust that parole conditions are real, that breaches are taken seriously, and that the state has not simply moved the burden of safety onto them.

A fifth reform in the works is giving victims and their families a stronger voice in parole hearings. Victims often know things that officials do not know. They may know whether the offender has threatened them, whether there is intimidation in the community, whether the proposed release address creates danger, or whether the offender has shown any real remorse.

A sixth reform is clearing historical backlogs of complex lifer parole applications. This may sound less dramatic, but it matters.

The seventh reform is practical rehabilitation. A prisoner who leaves jail with no work habits, no skills, no structure, and no lawful route to income is more likely to return to crime. Prison should therefore not be idle time. It should be used to build discipline. This latter objective will be particularly difficult to achieve in an environment of low economic growth where even non-offenders struggle to find work.

The question now is whether this will work. The country has heard many reform promises before. What matters is whether the department can reduce absconding, improve risk assessments, monitor parolees properly, find those who disappear, and prevent parole from being used as an answer to overcrowding. Fortunately, these are all quantitative measures of progress that will be easy enough to monitor.