Johannesburg — TWO new research papers question SA's approach to sentencing prisoners, with one saying the increased incidence of sentencing, together with heavier sentences, means there will be serious overcrowding in prisons in 10 years, and the other claiming that longer sentences do not actually reduce crime rates.

SA's prison population is projected to increase by more than 40000 sentenced prisoners over the next 10 years due partly to two laws. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1997 provides for mandatory minimum sentences of five, seven, 10, 15, 20, 25 years and life for a range of offences, including theft, corruption, assault, rape and murder. And the Magistrates Amendment Act extends the sentencing jurisdiction of the magistrate's court at both district and regional levels. The maximum penalty the district court could impose was increased from 12 months to three years, while the sentencing jurisdiction of regional courts was increased from 10 to 15 years' imprisonment.

The Criminal Law Amendment Act has a number of features to ensure that the intended severity of the prescribed sentences is not undermined by magistrates and judges. People sentenced under the act must serve four fifths of their sentence before they can be considered for parole and no part of their sentence can be suspended.

Chris Giffard and Lukas Muntingh write in the latest South African Crime Quarterly that, from the late 1990s to 2005, the increase in the general sentencing tariff played a major role in increasing the prison population.

"In general, the number of prisoners serving long sentences increased while the number of those serving shorter sentences decreased. The turnover of prisoners thus slowed down and, regardless of the fact that fewer offenders were being sentenced to imprisonment, they were staying there for longer," they write.

They say such increases in prisoner population affect the prisoners directly as they find themselves in overcrowded prisons. "Of equal concern is the proportion of prisoners detained in institutions in which there are three times as many prisoners than the capacity allows."

Giffard and Muntingh say there were no prisoners in this category until 1997, but by 2004 as many as 5% of all prisoners (or more than 9000 prisoners) were held in such facilities.

"The increases in all the sentence categories of longer than seven years have serious implications for prison overcrowding. The projections suggest that, assuming 9000 new prison places by 2010 and a further 9000 by 2015, the proportion of prison places taken up by prisoners serving sentences of longer than seven years will increase from 61% currently to 75% in 2010 and 88% in 2015.

"In 1995, this sentence category took up only 26% of the available capacity and in 2000, the corresponding figure was 45%," they write.

By the end of April, the correctional services department had 159961 prisoners in its jails. This comprised 113167 sentenced prisoners and 46794 awaiting trial detainees. The country's prisons can accommodate 114000 prisoners.

In another article in the same edition of the South African Crime Quarterly, Michael Tonry, professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, says comparisons of countries with different sentencing policies and punishment practices show sentencing and punishment have little discernible effect on crime trends and patterns.

Tonry says SA's correctional system has many similarities to the US's, such as seriously overcrowded prisons and long sentences. American "solutions" had neither reduced crime rates nor made the streets safer, he says.

During the period 1950 to 2000, the incarceration rates in Denmark, Norway and Sweden were similar, and the imprisonment rate in Finland dropped to a level similar to that of its neighbours, Tonry says. The comparative crime statistics across the four Nordic countries between 1960 and 2000 are nearly the same.

"The experience of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland shows the level of imprisonment makes no difference to the levels of crime -- the Finns decided to stabilise their imprisonment rate and steadily drop it to the level of their neighbours but their crime rate curves were the same as those of their neighbours."

Tonry says there is no evidence to show that mandatory or minimum sentencing has any effect on consistency of sentencing or levels of crime.

"The primary function of such sentences is for governments to symbolically say 'we are doing something about crime'. This does not fool anybody. The percentage of people who say they are fearful to go out at night before and after the imposition of mandatory sentencing does not seem to change."