An exploratory study on the rehabilitation of female offenders in South Africa.

Abstract

No two female offenders are the same. No two crimes are the same. Therefore, rehabilitation programmes need to be tailor-made to match the offender and the offender's crime. The purpose of offender rehabilitation stems from more than just discipline, and it is an opportunity for an offender to better herself. Owing to the low rate of female offending compared to male offending, previous studies focus mostly on male rehabilitation and experiences using a blanket approach to address female offender rehabilitation. This study was theorised to explore current rehabilitation programmes explicitly offered to female offenders and further exposes the lack of effective rehabilitative programmes available for female offenders. Female offenders are the key informants of this study, as they are one of the end-users of the rehabilitation programmes which the Department of Correctional Services1 offers. The marginalisation theory by Meda-Chesney Lind played a vital role in explaining the motive of crime for some female offenders (Mohammed, Banarjee and Khatun, 2014). According to Statistics South Africa (2020), females experience higher poverty levels within South Africa than their male counterparts. The researcher used a qualitative methodology to explore the experiences of female offenders who have been enrolled in rehabilitative programmes. This study concluded that rehabilitative programmes that are currently available are offered to assist female offenders with social challenges like poverty and unemployment. However, the lack of offence-specific programmes results in recidivism and offenders re-entering the correctional system to repeat the same programmes to meet their parole requirements. The risk factors of female offending identified within the study include poverty, anger, and drug use. Although the Department of Correctional Services has firm policy documents in place, poor implementation of these policies has failed the offenders and resulted in increased rates of recidivism. This study has successfully achieved its objectives by exploring current rehabilitation programmes, identifying the limitations of these rehabilitation programmes, and developing offence specific programmes such as career guidance for female offenders.