Bleak picture of prison health care

MEDICAL staff shortages, congested waiting lists, unattended complaints and no explanations regarding medications issued.

This was the picture painted by three ex-inmates – one from Gauteng, another from Bloemfontein and one from the Eastern Cape, who were incarcerated near Kimberley – on access to medical treatment in local prisons.

“Say you have flu and are detained in the older centres. You go to the official to lay a complaint so that you can be checked by a nurse to get treatment, but that complaint is sometimes not taken forward to the (prison’s) health centre. And because of the congestion of complaints, you become like a nuisance to an official. Some of them have the mentality that you deserve to die in there,” Solomon Maseko explained.

Maseko, 39, has been through the prison system after being imprisoned in 2003.

While he wouldn’t go into details about the reasons behind his incarceration, as he is currently out on parole after spending 13 years “inside”, he said that he witnessed numerous “inhumane” actions against prisoners.

“I’ve experienced a lot . . . physically, emotionally and psychologically. Not just me, but others I was imprisoned with. I didn’t have any chronic illnesses, fortunately, but I despised seeing others suffer,” he said.

The struggle to get chronic medication was just one of the ways many of his fellow inmates suffered, he explained.

“The problem would be that there was one nurse attending to 700 inmates,” Maseko said.

Luyanda Dolwana, 31, who was convicted in Cape Town for a seven-and-a-half-year term, recalled a time he had an excruciating toothache.

“I had to wait a month to get seen by a doctor, who then removed the tooth. I don’t blame the doctor, he was only one person with hundreds of people needing to see him”, said Dolwana.

The ex-inmates, through NGO Right To Care’s Correctional Service’s support department, have since become peer educators, trained in strengthening health care awareness and knowledge, not just in prisons, but in their communities too.

The organisation supports 89 Department of Correctional Services primary health care correctional service centres and seven pharmacies in KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and the Northern Cape.

“Health is one of the biggest things we need to pay attention to as a country. We have a problem of overcrowding in prisons and no proper air ventilation. In Kimberley, there were 10 of us in a cell whereas in Grootvlei there were 50 to 60 of us in a cell,” recalls Andrew Chokochela.

According to recent reports, at the end of March last year South Africa’s prisons only had 119 134 beds available for its 161 984 inmates.