Westville Correctional Centre bakery to save millions, equip inmates with job skills
In a move to make correctional facilities self-sustainable and reduce dependency on the state, Minister of Correctional Services, Dr Pieter Groenewald, opened a bakery in Durban this week.
The bakery was opened on Thursday in the Durban Management Area in Westville, KwaZulu-Natal.
It will enable inmates to bake bread for their consumption, cutting operational costs and generating significant savings for the department.
According to the ministry, the initiative also equipped offenders with baking and entrepreneurial skills to help them secure employment or start small businesses upon reintegration into society.
This, they said, furthered the department’s mandate of rehabilitation and reduced re-offending.
Groenewald said the bakery was an example of the department’s wider self-sufficiency programme, which also included agricultural land, steel shops, wood shops, and textile production. “When it comes to food, and specifically bread, we have inmates that contribute so that we can supply bread at a much cheaper price,” he said.
Groenewald added that the newly opened facility was the 13th bakery in the programme, with plans to expand the number to 20 by 2028.
“We save only in this bakery R3 million annually for the taxpayer. If you add all the other activities for self-sufficiency, in the previous year, we have saved the taxpayers about half a billion rand.”
The Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) welcomed the DCS’s bakery roll-out as part of its “long-overdue self-sustainability programme, an initiative we have consistently called for over the years as an alternative to the costly and corruption-prone tenderisation of services.”
“While we recognise this as a positive step in the right direction, much more still needs to be done to address the broader and deep-rooted challenges within our correctional system,” POPCRU said.
The organisation added that rehabilitation outcomes remain deeply concerning, with approximately 85% of inmates re-offending after release.
“This reflects a system that, as it stands, is not conducive to genuine rehabilitation. Limited access to technical training and life skills means many leave prison unprepared to survive outside, fuelling the cycle of crime.”
In South Africa, Section 19 of the Correctional Services Act No. 111 of 1998 requires prisons to provide education programmes to all convicts. This comprises academic and vocational training targeted at rehabilitating convicts and minimising recidivism.
The Act emphasises the need of education as part of a larger framework of correctional interventions aimed at addressing criminal behaviour and encouraging victim healing.
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