South Africa's Correctional Institutions, Short-Term offending, and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Crime prevention, offender rehabilitation, and social reintegration are fundamentally important to South Africa’s criminal justice system. A critical strategy deployed to ensure these is entrepreneurship education with the purpose to capacitate offenders with entrepreneurial skills, creativity, and innovation, prepare them for self-supporting life after release, and forestall repeat offending. This approach to ensuring self-reliance and discouraging recidivism – as it would seem - appears to be skewed more in favour of long-term offenders than short offenders whose sentences are likely to terminate before they are able to benefit from this intervention. This paper thus foregrounds the necessity of doing justice to the coverage of entrepreneurship education by the South Africa’s correctional institutions to short-term offenders to avoid the inadvertent alienation from the benefits inherent in entrepreneurial education. The shortness of short- term sentences must, however, be factored into the reform sought such that the entrepreneurial training does not necessarily have to be confined to the correctional institutions or limited to sentence duration.

Keywords

• crime
• economic autonomy
• resourcing
• restorative justice
• society