Remand detainees go to court once or twice a month but still wait five to eight years to be sentenced or freed.
This was revealed by the Auditor-General in Parliament on Wednesday, 28 October.
“We have noted that while the remand detainees do attend court about once or twice a month, they still remain unsentenced for five to eight years. That means the backlog needs to be dealt with across the JCPS cluster, to ensure that the ripple effect felt by Correctional Services, being at the tail end, is addressed,” said Omphemetse Setebe, senior manager at the Auditor General of South Africa (AGSA).
She was briefing the NCOP Select Committee on Security and Justice.
According to Setebe the delays hit detainees no matter what they are charged with.
“We also note that the delays that were observed were across the different offence types, and not necessarily dependent on the nature or severity of the offence,” she revealed.
Remand detainees now take up more than a third of prison space.
“We also note that a fair percentage of the inmates are remand detainees, at 36%, and the department does not have sufficient bed space capacity to house all of the inmates together. The current capacity available is mainly linked to the sentenced offenders,” Setebe said.
Senior audit manager Uviwe Platjie-Ruxwana said AGSA followed individual detainees through the system to find out what was holding them up.
“One of the key reasons that we obtained was the backlog on the side of the Department of Justice in terms of the processing,” she said.
“What we did on our side was an exercise where we followed the life of a remand detainee, for a sample of remand detainees that we had selected, just to see what is really causing the backlogs and what is causing the processes to take longer. We believe that if the department is able to address the challenge of keeping large numbers of remand detainees, it can assist the department in alleviating the overcrowding.
“What we have noted is that the remand detainees actually do appear in court. However, what takes longer is getting to a point where they are either sentenced or found not to have committed any offence. That is where the process does take long. But they do appear in court, because on the ones that we looked at, we noted that on average they went to court once or twice a month. So the challenge is getting to the final sentencing of the remand detainees,” she continued.
The department cannot even properly measure whether long detentions are sent back to court for review.
“In the current year we had one, which is less in number, but the issue is that it has persisted. That was mainly due to the indicator on the percentage of court referrals of remand detainees who qualify for length of detention review. The indicator was referring to a section 62F, but there was no clear reference as to what relevant legislation it was referring to,” Setebe said.
The department missed its overcrowding target.
“The impact of the non-achievement is that the correctional facilities remain overcrowded, which has an impact on the safe, secure and humane incarceration of the inmates,” Setebe said.
EFF MP Virgill Gericke said the Minister had promised a way to get poor detainees out on bail.
“Way back, the Minister of Correctional Services gave an undertaking that there is a partnership going on, where an organisation was going to pay bail on behalf of those people. Or the department could have made a decision to release those people instead of having them as a burden on the state,” Gericke said.
“That is the problem, and that is a contributing factor towards overcrowding in our prisons. We should expect that there’s movement in that area, but we did not hear anything in that regard,” he said.
Committee chairperson Jane Seboletswe Mananiso said: “Remand detainees at 36%, with insufficient bed space, remain a concern. Detainees remain unsentenced for five to eight years.
“We have a collective concern regarding fraud and the falsification of documentation in DCS, continuous overcrowding, particularly in respect of remand detainees, as well as concerns regarding parole management and violations, which we will raise directly with the department and JICS.”
At the end of March 2026 there were about 169,000 inmates in facilities designed for 107,000.
The Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services heard on 6 October that the bail fund had paid bail for 137 remand detainees at Goodwood and Pollsmoor by the end of July 2026. The number had since risen above 150.
Those detainees all had bail set below R1,000.
At the same meeting, the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services reported 2,137 remand detainees with bail below R1,000 who could not afford it, and 4,112 who had been awaiting trial for more than two years.
AGSA also told the committee that only 7% of inmates have ID numbers captured on the department’s systems.
The Constitution gives every accused person the right to have their trial begin and end without unreasonable delay.
The committee will meet the department and the Judicial Inspectorate on 11 November.