Last Sunday, minister of health Dr Zweli Mkhize announced that two-thirds of the SA population would be given the Covid-19 vaccine as the government aims for herd immunity. The vaccine, which will be rolled out in three phases, will see healthcare workers having first access. The second phase will see other essential workers such as teachers and police officers get vaccinated. In this phase, the elderly and people with comorbidities will also be included. But importantly, prisoners will also be prioritised.
There has been uproar on social media about the government’s plan to prioritise prisoners before the rest of the population. Many are arguing that prisoners should not be treated better than law-abiding citizens, and that they should be last to receive the vaccine.
This argument is deeply problematic and if left unchallenged, will create the false impression that prisoners in SA receive special treatment. They do not, and the decision by the government to prioritise them is morally correct.
The state of prisons in our country is appalling. There are presently just over 240 prisons that are housing more than 160,000 inmates, based on a 2017 department of correctional services report. The same report indicates that our prisons only had 119,134 bed spaces available for this inmate population. Prisons in urban areas are in worse conditions. The Johannesburg Correctional Centre’s Medium B was 233% full, which translates into a shortage of almost 2,000 beds. Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town had a shortage of nearly 2,500 beds.
The overcrowding in prisons is not the only factor that is resulting in inhuman living conditions that prisoners experience. Our prisons have poor ventilation, inadequate ablution facilities, lack of proper sanitation, and a shortage of beds and bedding. This creates a crucible of the violence that characterises our prisons, as well as creates a hotbed for the transmission of diseases. In such conditions, Covid-19 would spread very easily, and we would experience severe outbreaks in our prisons.
Should there be an outbreak in prisons, implications are that prison officials will also be infected as they work in close contact with inmates. We already have insufficient prison personnel. Having prison officials locked in quarantine would present a national security crisis as prisoners would have low supervision. The thought of convicted serial rapists and murderers escaping from prison should scare us more than anything else.
Additionally, prisoners are likely to have high levels of comorbidities that are undiagnosed as they don’t have adequate access to constant health check-ups and other health services. We know already that we have a high HIV/Aids rate in our prisons, which is worsened by the sexual violence that happens in there and goes unreported.
So, we can conclude that many prisoners are ill and undiagnosed, and that contracting Covid-19 could kill them. If we don’t prioritise the vaccination of prisoners, we risk an outbreak that will place a huge burden on our already overwhelmed healthcare infrastructure. As prisoners are a responsibility of the state, they need to be provided with public healthcare services. This will come at a huge cost on us economically because the beds they will occupy will mean other people would not be able to receive assistance. At a time when our tax pool has decreased significantly due to job losses and a stagnant economy, we can ill-afford any more economic burdens.
But beyond the question of national security and the economy, we must prioritise prisoners because they are vulnerable human beings. Their being convicted of crimes, even the most heinous of them, should not make us discard their human rights. To quote SA’s most famous prisoner, Nelson Mandela: “No-one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
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