Namibian Correctional Service commissioner general Raphael Hamunyela says the overcrowding issue in police facilities is due to a bottleneck in the processing system of inmates. This comes as a response to a report on the conditions in correctional facilities by a parliamentary standing committee.
The report describes overcrowding issues of up to 200 to 300% in facilities such as police holding cells.
Prison facilities, meanwhile, are not experiencing overcrowding. Hamunyela suggests there may in fact be several hundred beds available on that end. The problem lies with holding cells and jails where unsentenced individuals are held, and the length of the process of moving prisoners from the early stages of the system towards rehabilitation.
“Most facilities are hosting inmates at a certain level. You can’t mix sentenced and unsentenced inmates,” he explains.
For example, he suggests the facility at Katima Mulilo is too far away from others to allow spill-over. The nearest facility can only host individuals much further along in the rehabilitation process, who are able to work on their own through the correctional service’s programmes with much less supervision. Mixing the two would be dangerous.
Hamunyela argues that the problem is less of space and more on the duration it takes for a person to go through the court system and be sentenced and assigned to a certain level.
“The issue lies in expediting the processing and s
entencing.”
