Abstract
A 1997 project established by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based non-government organisation, aimed to alleviate overcrowding in South African prisons by assisting magistrates in bail proceedings and thereby decreasing the number of admissions into awaiting trial facilities. Understanding the context in which the project operated leads to the important observation that efforts to launch and sustain discrete experiments in justice innovation will necessarily come under strain when faced with aggressively adverse macro circumstances, like the ones that faced Vera’s pre-trial project. However, the legal and social milieu has changed over the last twelve years. It is perhaps time to once again explore how innovations in criminal justice administration (a much-needed initiative) might best work in the various criminal justice management areas, given the discrete circumstances of each.
Highlights
That public concern about crime and public safety in general, and the subsequent legislative and judicial responses in particular, played some role in the project’s ultimate demise
It was envisioned that the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) – a joint venture between Vera and the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DJCD) – would spearhead the design and implementation of various projects aimed at improving local capacities for innovations in justice administration and justice delivery in South Africa.[7]
Crime in general has decreased over the last decade, the question whether South Africans are more or less fearful of crime has become, to some extent, a less critical factor today than it was in the late 1990s
Summary
It was envisioned that the BJA – a joint venture between Vera and the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DJCD) – would spearhead the design and implementation of various projects aimed at improving local capacities for innovations in justice administration and justice delivery in South Africa.[7] The first such project was the Pre-Trial Services project (PTS), whose purpose was to assist magistrates in making more equitable bail decisions by providing them with independently verified information about defendants at their first appearance.[8] The provision of such a report firstly aimed to ensure that serious or repeat offenders were not released on bail, and secondly that petty offenders were released on affordable bail or on non-financial supervisory conditions.[9] The report was meant to provide a fuller picture of a defendant’s overall financial means so as to mitigate the chance of bail amounts being set too high, and to prevent the economic injustice of remanding defendants who pose no threat to public safety into custody for not being able to afford bail thresholds. An appreciation for the political and social climate in South Africa during this time, in relation to crime and associated public perceptions, fears and reactions, is helpful both in understanding the context in which the PTS project was conceived and implemented and the external challenges it faced, and why remand detention in general remains a problem in South Africa
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