A Decade of Criminal Justice in South Africa

Towards an Integrated Justice System Approach

by
Pieter du Rand
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pieter du Rand is chief director of the court services branch of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development

Introduction

The media and some persons at time tend to be somewhat negative about what is happening in courts or the criminal justice system, but I am fortunate to be dealing with a topic today that has resulted in practice in some positive results. I wish to indicate up front that I am certain we are on the right track and whilst the challenges ahead remain substantial we have the right building blocks in place to deal with them in a constructive and realistic manner.

In his address at the official opening of the Constitutional Court in March 2004, President Mbeki reminded us that: "As South Africans, we are all partners in the great enterprise of ensuring that the promise of our Constitution is fully realised, making a positive impact on the lives of all our citizens." This recognizes that we need to work together for greater results. But, what is this promise of our Constitution?

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Act 108 0f 1996), which is the supreme law of the country, in its preamble indicates the objectives and values we as a nation have adopted to build a new society. These are, inter alia, to –

It is against this backdrop that the Criminal Justice System (or CJS) operates.

I have been requested to focus my presentation on the question of Criminal Justice System integration from the perspective of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development. In doing so, I will touch also on aspects relating to -

Courts as the Central Cog in the Criminal Justice System

Simply stated as a premise, the justice system is one of the most important pillars of our democracy. If it fails, our whole democracy is in danger. The courts and their proper functioning are therefore crucial to our society.

In terms of Section 165 of the Constitution, the judicial authority in South Africa is vested in the courts, which are independent and subject only to the Constitution and the law. As you are aware, the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (hereinafter referred to as the DOJ) is responsible for the administration of the courts and constitutional development. The DOJ is accountable to the public and the State in rendering accessible, fair, speedy and cost-effective administration of justice in the interest of a safer and more secure South Africa. However, it performs these functions in conjunction with the judiciary, prosecuting authority and the various role players such as SAPS, Social Development, Correctional Services and legal representatives.

The CJS, or as it is also known as, the Integrated Justice System (IJS), is made up of a variety of processes and interdependent links and is in fact a "virtual organization".

The various participating departments cooperate and work together to achieve a common goal, namely to establish an integrated justice process for SA, premised on the Constitution.

The various links cannot operate in silos.

If one looks at some of these processes, one sees that:

The criminal justice system has to be made to function well across its entire value chain – investigations; arrests; prosecutions; finalisation of cases in time; and aspects relating to awaiting trial (AWT) detainees and sentenced persons including the rehabilitation of offenders.

If the chain is weakened or broken anywhere, it leads to justice not to be done or experienced – that in turn leads to legitimacy concerns and the public losing faith in the CJS.

In terms of quality, justice is the highest principle for the CJS: justice for victims and witnesses, justice for defendants and justice for society as a whole.

What are the Key Components of Criminal Justice Integration and What is the Role of the Courts in This?

To reduce crime effectively, to deliver justice and to enhance public confidence, the CJS has to work as a coherent, joined-up system, with all those involved, adopting a common set of values to meet a common set of goals. The CJS cannot meet its aims of delivering justice and reducing crime unless it operates effectively as a system and unless it works in fruitful partnership with other role players and local communities.

We need to learn from the past and in this regard it cannot be denied that mistakes have been made in certain instances where there were piecemeal reform, changing practice in one area without anticipating the impact elsewhere in the system. It is only by treating the system holistically that we can ensure it becomes more effective at reducing crime. We require a CJS operating effectively in its entirety, providing an effective, intelligent response to modern crime and criminality.

The end-to-end process of criminal justice is a complex one. Cooperation is therefore important, but so too is maintaining necessary constitutional independencies. Efforts to join up the system must recognise the interdependence of the constituent instances, while continuing to respect the constitutional independence of operational policing, prosecution and judicial decisions.

In order to deal with this more effectively we have moved towards an Integrated Justice System approach. (In dealing with the IJS and how it came about, I wish to refer to the content of an article by a DOJ colleague, Mr Hassen Ebrahim (The Integrated Justice System; How Far We've Come; SDR vol 2 No 3, 2003):) In 1996, the government launched the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS). The NCPS introduced a comprehensive, new approach to addressing crime with a shift from narrowly focused, functional approaches of reactive crime control to a co-operative approach of proactive crime prevention. A key focus of the NCPS initiative was the development of an Integrated Justice System and it was in response to this initiative that the Departments of Justice and Constitutional Development, Correctional Services, Social Development, Safety and Security, the South African Police Services and the National Prosecuting Authority established an inter-departmental board – the IJS Board(under the chairmanship of a Deputy Director General of the Department of Justice, Mr Hassen Ebrahim.)

Up until the late 1990s, the justice system in South Africa was subject to many challenges. (This had a very specific impact on the courts.) Systems were manual and transactions were paper-based, labour-intensive and often error prone. Dockets went missing and/or were misplaced. Furthermore, there were no standards governing how information should be managed or shared. As a result, the turnaround times for many were extremely slow, resulting in a justice system that was largely inefficient. In addition to this, departments in the JCPS cluster operated in "silos" with little or no integration between them. Once the IJS Board was formed in 1997, the Mulweli consortium was assigned to analyse the current situation and recommend a way forward. What followed was a high-level report, produced in 1998, which confirmed that the justice system was running out of capacity and was subject to excessive churn resulting in major inefficiencies. The Mulweli Report identified the management of cases through the justice system as a particular area of weakness. Courts were faced with huge backlogs and prisons were overcrowded with the number of awaiting trial prisoners increasing at an alarming rate.

The Mulweli consortium identified 146 blockages in the system that could only be solved by an integrated approach amongst the four core government departments by means of an Integrated Justice System Programme. As a solution to these blockages they suggested:

96 quick fix projects to be implemented by different departments;
26 fast track projects of an IJS nature to be conducted under the auspices of different lead departments; and
6 enterprise level projects.

Some of these recommendations were implemented but the main recommendations made in the Mulweli Report were, unfortunately, unaffordable and as a result the Department of Finance commissioned a study (LMI Report 1999) that confirmed the approach and costs to implement an Integrated Justice System. Following this, the IJS Board appointed a task team in 1999 to undertake an international mission, the purpose of which was to investigate integrated case management systems elsewhere in the world. It is interesting to note that not one of the countries visited dealt with integration across various business processes as extensively as the Board envisaged for its own system. There were, therefore, no real reference sites to use as a basis, leaving the IJS Board to develop a South African integrated justice system from scratch.

The Government's vision of an internationally respected judicial system is being realised by the IJS Programme, which has as its objective, the transformation of the existing process into an integrated, streamlined, modern business system that is supported by state-of-the-art technology. The Integrated Justice System programme has as aim to assist the relevant Government departments to manage people, their associated cases and exhibits through the justice system from the time when a crime is reported until the offender is released back into the community.

If the justice system is not integrated, blockages and issues will occur that may cause delays in the effective conclusion of criminal cases.

The collective strategic goal of the IJS Board, (subject to the directive of the Development Committee,) is: To achieve greater efficiency in the management of cases, persons and exhibits, in conjunction with the measures instituted by the various role players. This is being done by contributing towards:

All of these aspects will obviously have an impact on SA prisons and will lead to further decreasing the number of AWT detainees. If we have children diverted from the CJS it not only deal with them as a vulnerable group in an improved manner but it also reduces pressure on prisons who have to keep them in separate accommodation (no education etc)

Strategic approach: An Enterprise Focus - The integration of the entire Justice System, as envisaged by the clustering of government's various departments, has required the collective efforts of each department participating in the cluster. There are a large number of multifaceted and multi-disciplinary efforts and exercises that contribute to the realisation of such a vision. This is the responsibility of the respective JCPS cluster departments, led by the respective Directors-General within the Cluster. A Development Committee has been established to sustain progress within the programme and the enhanced cooperation and coordination with the Cluster activities. The work in this regard will continue to be crucial for the decade.

Again I want to indicate in this regard the impact of such clustered coordination on Prisons. AWT policy is at the moment receiving attention of the JCPS cluster as Correctional Services is of the view that their mandate is rather to rehabilitate prisoners.

When both planning and executing its tasks, the IJS Board has been obliged to take into consideration various environmental factors. These may relate to legislative changes, shifts in government policy, and departmental projects and other initiatives that may have an impact on the realisation of the IJS vision. The Programme and strategic plans therefore have to be dynamically updated and aligned to take these into account.

Since the MULWELI Report in 1997, the IJS programme has evolved through different stages. The IJS 2000 Plus Strategy was drawn up to ensure that business processes within the South African justice system take full advantage of the opportunities offered by technology. In line with government's mandate of modernisation, the IJS aims to:

I believe that the above interactions are crucial because in any organisation, managers need to know how their business is performing to be able to improve it. The CJS collects a vast amount of data, but it is not focused on cross-system performance. We need to share such information. We also need to limit duplication in developing tools to do any monitoring. At the moment, basic information about CJS performance is sometimes difficult to obtain. And where data exists, it is rarely collected on a common basis. This seriously hampers the ability to identify and spread better ways of working and to understand the impact of current practices. At the moment there is no end to end electronic processing of individual criminal cases. So as a case progresses through the system, the same data may be entered repeatedly by the police, courts, correctional services, Legal Aid Board (LAB) and social Development. As well as duplicating effort, this increases the risk that mistakes will occur. It also means that if we do not have proper information of for example, the daily/weekly/monthly number of sentenced and awaiting trial detainees, broken down in relation to periods of detention etc, we cannot make the required inter-sectoral interventions. In fact, this then impacts negatively on the capacity of prisons. It also disempowers the courts to assist by dealing with the persons before them in an appropriate manner.

Some achievements of the IJS: Since its inception, the IJS Board has realised some remarkable achievements. These can be summarised as follows:

1. Court Process Project (CPP)
The Court Process Project (CPP), which was initiated in 2000, was the first project to deal with an integrated criminal case management system as well as a civil solution. The CPP was the first serious attempt to bring advanced IT functionality and support to the courts. Modular functionality and roll out thereof is currently receiving attention.

2. Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)
Under the auspices of the IJS, the AFIS system has been implemented and rolled out country-wide. Implementation of the system has had a significant impact on the process of identification of criminals, reducing the time to identify from 8 weeks down to only 48 hours. It has also resulted in criminal identifications increasing from 1 000 to 1 800 per day.

3. IJS members have become partners
Working as a team, the various entities within the JCPS cluster have leveraged from the economies of scale, especially in terms of bulk procurement, and making use of systems developed in one cluster. An example of the latter is the Justice Deposit Account System (JDAS) which has been developed by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development but is used by all of the departments/entities in the JCPS cluster. (JDAS administers monies received at Magistrates' courts in lieu of maintenance, bail, admission of guilt, fines, civil cases, contributions, court cases and estates).

4. Inmate Tracking system in Prisons
This is being piloted in some prisons and ensure we know exactly who is where to prevent wrong releases or the wrong people taken to court etc.

5. Inter-operability
Under the auspices of the IJS, the JCPS cluster is the first cluster within government that is pursuing interoperability. The IJS Interoperability Project is leading the path and aims to provide a comprehensive integration architecture and platform in which the underlying criminal justice business process may be integrated. The project will provide a consistent security strategy across the IJS user community base and will provide for a single point of interaction for all IJS users.
Currently, the IJS programme is also involved with amongst others, the following:

The JCPS / NCPS / NCCS

The 10 year review by the government indicated that there were many factors that bedeviled an efficient and effective functioning of the JCPS departments before 1994: they broadly lacked integrity and legitimacy; their mandates and functions were vague and ambiguous and largely directed at shoring up an illegitimate system; they often functioned in an uncoordinated manner; they were not subject to any effective and credible oversight and control mechanism; they were characterised by an uneven distribution of resources between the traditional white and black areas; and the approach to fighting crime did not include addressing the main causes thereof. Transformation of the security and criminal justice functions was therefore essential in bringing about legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness, while at the same time striving to reduce the levels of crime and enhance stability and security.

The National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS) in the previous decade laid the foundation for our approach towards crime. This and the National Crime Combating Strategy (2000), marked important shifts in our approach to dealing with crime aimed at greater interaction between the various clusters and departments. This work continues at present and is currently managed through the various clusters.

Over the past few years, the Justice Crime Prevention and Security (JCPS) cluster has implemented several priorities in an integrated manner that has yielded good results, and the following are a few examples:

Yet the cluster can clearly not rest on its laurels as:

In addition, the JCPS cluster will have to continue giving priority attention to several of the priorities that derive from previous Cabinet makgotla. Among others, these are:

In implementing the above and the other priorities, the cluster have prioritized to significantly improve its implementation mechanisms, including coordinating mechanisms within the JCPS itself in the first instance and with the social and economic clusters in the second instance.

The development of sustainable partnerships with organs of civil society and community based organisations will also constitute an important element of the cluster's implementation strategy. This is part and parcel of our integrated approach. In this regard, specific partnerships and projects will be established with the Moral Regeneration Movement (MRM) and Business against Crime (BAC), the latter to focus, in part, on street children. The former will be approached with a view to increasing its input in crime prevention initiatives. This also plays an important role in relation to aspects such as restorative justice and through it reconciling victims and offenders; and diversion through the establishment of appropriate programs to assist the courts in dealing with offenders in a different manner.

In respect to the priority to improve coordination, particular focus will be required and given to ensuring that cooperation is deepened between the law enforcement agencies, the National Prosecuting Authority and the intelligence structures. This will be most relevant in respect to dealing with:

It is also of importance that the JCPS cluster, in conjunction with the economic and social clusters, will have to closely examine in an integrated manner any challenges deriving from the socio-economic developments that have occurred over the past ten years, such as:

How Have Efforts Towards Integrated Management Impacted on the Courts?

Though the Department of Justice has come under increasing pressure in recent years to improve the efficiency of the courts in criminal cases, we cannot do this alone.

The department is attending to its mandate and goals through 3 main focus areas, namely -

I am not going to deal with these aspects in detail as my colleague, Adv Jiyane will deal with them in his paper tomorrow in plenary 3. Similarly and for the same reason, I will not deal with aspects relating to steps to improve the effectiveness of the courts such as:

The reason I mention these aspects is because they all are relevant in terms of integration of the CJS. Each and every one of these projects and activities cannot function without the support and interdependent interaction of other IJS role players interaction between BAC/ prosecuting authority/ DOJ/ SAPS etc. Take for example, commercial crime courts and the interdependencies ban. In general where such integration is lacking, problems arise and we do not achieve what we set out to do effectively.

Challenges arise as a result of many inter-related facets, including budgetary constraints, resource and skill constraints, and lack of inter-departmental coordination/planning. These deficiencies are not limited to a single department but are experienced across the integrated justice system and our partners in the police, correctional services and social development have similar problems as justice in implementing policies and delivering on promised services.

Fortunately we have started in some respects to do strategic planning together, to invite other role players and instances to our respective lekgotlas etc. This can only lead to improved coordination and better results in achieving our objectives.

Another positive aspect is that we are moving towards sharing resources and are moving towards presenting the public with integrated service delivery points (one stop centres / community safety centres / child justice centres / family court centres etc).

With regard to the new parole boards there is also room for the various departments to interact with Correctional Services so that we can ensure that there are not complaints from the judiciary/ prosecuting authority when there are releases on parole.

Various measures by JCPS departments and instances such as the Legal Aid Board in trying to improve the overcrowding situation/ dealing properly with the Constitutional rights of all persons have also paid dividends. Examples in this regard include improved case flow management; sexual offences courts; commercial crime courts; LAB justice centre staff visiting prisons on weekends to assist prisoners and try and fast track their cases (plea bargaining) prosecutors screening new cases on Sundays at Police Stations; video arraignments – to enable the postponement of cases through video link between prison and court; the NPA stepping up its frequency in the monitoring of case cycle times to a monthly basis; prison courts being set up (prevent need for traveling) and the Saturday and additional court project that helped reduce the case backlog by 76 836 cases between 2001 and 2004.

The Criminal Justice Strengthening Programme (CJSP)

As part of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development's programme to make the criminal justice system more effective and accessible to all the people of South Africa, the Department launched the Criminal Justice Strengthening Programme (CJSP) on 5 August 2002. Through this initiative, the US and SA governments joined forces with Business Against Crime (BAC) in a new strategic alliance to strengthen SA's criminal justice system. USAID is providing technical assistance and funding across six years to enable SA's young democracy to transform the Justice Sector. Fighting crime is not the job of government alone: "It is appropriate for government and business to improve the justice system together, since crime may deter international investment and threaten economic growth needed so urgently for sustainable transformation."

The six-year program aims to achieve key results considered critical to administration of justice in South Africa: such as training justice officials to provide better service to the public and strengthening the institutional capacity of justice sector institutions. The CJSP initiative is aimed at some of the most important operational areas within the justice department, such as the Court Services Business Unit, the Sexual Offences and Community Affairs department of the National Prosecuting Authority (SOCA), the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, and the Justice College (addressing issues such as: streamlining the process of dealing with sexual offenders / domestic violence training / rationalising and streamlining court management).

IJS FORA

I would be amiss if I did not also mention the necessity of not only dealing with matters on a national level, but also on provincial and local levels. Fortunately work is being done to improve such coordination and have proper functioning JCPS/ IJS fora in place. This is essential in regard to monitoring and in ensuring that possible blockages in the CJS can be speedily addressed at lower level in an integrated fashion. We need to continue the work in this regard and build on best practice models such as the MADAM structure here in the Western Cape which seems to be functioning well.

Bail or Sentencing

I do not have time to also deal with aspects such as bail or sentencing but wish to reflect that all these processes require proper interaction between the various role players. This includes Correctional Services which have through overcrowding in prisons a very real interest in such matters. Fortunately I know that Judge Fagan will be dealing with such aspects in his presentation next up.

Conclusion

Since 1994 the Department of Justice has been transforming the justice system piece by piece. We have done so on behalf of the people of South Africa and because it is not only necessary to bring the justice system in line with the Constitution, but also to restore its legitimacy in the eyes of the people and to establish trust in and respect for the law and its institutions.

To achieve this we have been working full steam towards improving the interaction between the various departments in the integrated justice system (IJS). Measures we have implemented and continue to be involved with include:

There remain many challenges in the IJS and for the JCPS, including aspects relating to overcrowding of prisons and dealing with awaiting trial detainees effectively. This will receive further attention in 2005.

We have made a good start – but there is much more to be done if we are to restore people's faith in the ability of the criminal system to deliver justice and help reduce crime.

 
Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation
Criminal Justice Conference Proceedings

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