Grisly prison visit for pupils
NATURENA – As part of Parkview police’s Social Crime Prevention Projects, pupils of Roosevelt High School were taken on a trip to the Johannesburg Correctional Centre.
Sun City, as the prison is better known, is the largest prison in the southern hemisphere and is home to some of the countries’ most hardened criminals. The pupils acquainted themselves with the distressing reality of daily life behind prison bars.
The pupils visited female and male sections of the prison. Inmates encouraged the pupils to keep away from drugs and crime as that would almost guarantee them a bed inside the grisly prison walls.
In the male section, boys were ushered into a cell that is designed to hold about 30 inmates, but has about 150 occupants, “Some of them sleep on the floor,” a warder told them. All of the inmates in that cell use a single toilet and a shower.
The boys sat on the bunk beds as they were told how some inmates would have to defecate in their hands or in plastic bags if they had a stomach bug. They also listened to graphic details of how new inmates get raped while others sing loudly to conceal the screams of the victim.
Police hoped that the oral accounts of the inmates would encourage the teenagers to think twice, and desist from criminal and unlawful activities.
