Question NW3429 to the Minister of Justice and Correctional Services

Reply:

Section 16 (1) of the Correctional Services Act (CSA),111 of 1998, as amended, states that: “The Department may provide correction, development and care programmes and services even when not required to do so by this Act”, and in Section 41 of the Act, it provides, under subsection “Treatment, development and support services. (1) The Department must provide or give access to as full a range of programmes and activities, including needs-based programmes as is practicable to meet the educational and training needs of sentenced offenders”.

Children offenders are children aged between 14-17 years of age. This category of offenders are given the opportunity to access formal education programmes. The following formal education programmes are offered to all offenders: -

• Further Education and Training (FET): Grades 10-12. All those offenders that have successfully completed the above-mentioned programme get an opportunity to pursue studies in the FET Band following a curriculum known as Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS), similar to all external schools within the education system of the country.
• Children are also given the opportunity to attend Adult Education and Training (AET) Levels 1-4 if they do not want to attend Grade 10-12 mainstream education. This is equivalent to Grades 1-9 in normal mainstream education and it’s for offenders who want to pursue studies in the General Education and Training (GET) Band.
• Child offenders who enter Correctional centres late in the academic year, might only be enrolled in the following academic year for formal education programmes. However, all offenders, including children have access to a range of Sports, recreation, arts, and culture programmes and also have access to libraries.

The department is also rendering needs based rehabilitative programmes to child offenders by Social Workers among other professionals.

The following programmes and services were rendered to sentenced children, including parolees, probationers and children in remand detention for the Financial Year 2021/2022 by Social Workers.

 

Programmes and services	Sentenced Children	Remand Children
	Correctional Centres	Community Corrections
Substance Abuse	3	1	5
Life-Skills	25	16	20
Marriage and Family Care	25	17	18
Sexual Offender	3	7	0
Anger Management,	9	4	6
Orientation Treatment	0	2	0
Cool and fit for life	0	1	0
Parenting	1	0	0
Supportive Services	13	4	0
Trauma	2	0	2
Assessment	64	19	0
TOTAL	145	71	51
NB: Some child offenders attended multiple programmes

 

END