mbulelo smpofu
The local penal code has been transforming markedly over the past 30 years.
From a largely punitive, tit-for-tat, an-eye-for-an-eye one, it is becoming increasingly corrective and rehabilitative.
Yes, it still sends the message to criminals that their ways are wrong and punishable, but at the same time, attempts to give them a second chance.
In 1996, the country’s first open prison for male convicts was opened at Connemara near Kwekwe. In June 2021, the Government opened the second such prison in Marondera, this one to serve female convicts.
Inmates in open prisons are allowed to visit friends and relatives on off-days and can host them; they wear personal clothes, cook for themselves and have keys to their prison rooms.
In addition, the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service (ZPCS) is intensifying educational and skills training for thousands of inmates. Some of them are actually working at MacDonald Bricks here in Bulawayo, earning wages part of which they can send out to their families.
The ZPCS also has regular open days on which prisons countrywide are opened for people to visit their jailed friends and relatives.
In December, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Ziyambi Ziyambi said the Government is reviewing its laws with a plan to implement a parole system. This will allow, subject to one meeting a range of stringent conditions, a prisoner to be released before they complete their sentences.
On the whole, this model helps inmates to reintegrate into society more smoothly at the point of their release. It corrects and rehabilitates.
On New Year’s Eve, President Mnangagwa signed the Death Penalty Abolition Bill into law, ensuring the country joined a global movement that rejects capital punishment. This means that the 48 men who had been on death row have had their lives spared. Their punishments have now been commuted to life in jail.
We have become the 24th African nation and 127th globally to scrap the ultimate penalty from its criminal code.
Coming almost 20 years since the last execution in the country and the ranks of the condemned growing to 62 by 2022 before falling to 48 now, we laud the Government for launching the country into the New Year with a promise of life.
We understand that some of us, especially those whose relatives were murdered in aggravating circumstances, would have felt a sense of justice being delivered if those who killed their relatives also got killed.
The case of Rodney Jindu, who murdered two people in Bulawayo in January 2017, dismembering and setting body parts of one of his victims on fire, comes to mind.
Without belittling the crimes that sent them to jail in the first place, we are of the considered view that no one deserves to lose their life on the basis of a court ruling. That is vindictive, cold and worse-than-animalistic. That does not make our society any different from the Jindu type.
shloboe boe
