Carl Niehaus knows all about South African prisons. He spent seven years in one for fighting apartheid.
Now a member of Parliament for the governing African National Congress, Niehaus has headed a committee studying how to revamp the archaic, discriminatory penal system.His prognosis?
"I do not think that in the short term we are really going to be able to improve the situation in our prisons," Niehaus recently told The Associated Press. "I foresee that our prison population is going to increase rather than decrease over the next few years, and I think conditions in our prisons are going to get worse."
Such an assessment seems bitterly ironic, coming from someone once put in solitary confinement for whistling in the penitentiary hallway.
But the ANC, led by the world's most famous former political prisoner - Nelson Mandela - lacks the resources to immediately overhaul an overburdened prison system that continues practices it has long abhorred.
To be sure, some progress has been made.
Inhumane punishments such as whipping, hard labor, straitjackets and food deprivation have been abolished. Prisons once segregated into black, white, Indian and mixed-race institutions have been integrated.
"There is a total movement away from the old way of treating prisoners," said Stephen Korabie, prisons commissioner in Western Cape province.
But more than 30 months after the ANC took power in South Africa's first all-race election, suspects are detained without trial for a year or more and children are jailed in adult institutions. Most of the nation's 250 prisons are overcrowded by the 120,000 or so convicts and people awaiting trial.
Lacking money to build more prisons, Mandela's government has released people convicted of nonviolent crimes to ease the pressure. But mounting calls to stem a rising crime rate have forced it to stiffen penalties and tighten bail and parole conditions, exacerbating the overcrowding.
That has forced the government into some distasteful decisions.
Mandela last year signed a proclamation making it illegal to jail suspects younger than 18. More than 1,000 youths were released from prisons, and a lack of juvenile facilities meant most ended up on the streets, including some accused of rape, armed robbery and other violent crime.
A public outcry led to a law recommended by Niehaus' committee that allowed children accused of violent crimes to be put in jail until their cases were heard.
At Cape Town's maximum- and medium-security Pollsmoor Prison, 117 youths aged 14-17 await trial, with no facilities for classes or sports.