Prison Overcrowding and the Constitutional Right to Adequate Accommodation in South Africa

The subsequent paper commissioned by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in January 2005, takes a look at the multiple facets of the prison environment in relation to overcrowding as well as accommodation. It reflects on the puzzling decisions with regards to legislature, prison trends in post-apartheid South Africa and the various applicable litigation strategies and remedies to the issue.

 

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Jonny Steinberg

Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer and scholar. He is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa's transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, and The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. He was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate in political theory.