- The DA demands answers after three offenders were wrongly released from Pollsmoor.
- The case exposes major failures between Justice and Correctional Services.
- The DA calls for urgent reform to stop future breaches.
With the re-apprehension and reincarceration of the third individual erroneously released from Pollsmoor prison, despite a High Court order that all three convicted offenders be held at Pollsmoor Juvenile Centre, the DA demands full disclosure of how this grave failure was allowed to happen.
This latest arrest, following weeks of DA-led oversight, underscores not only the seriousness of the breach but also the essential role of parliamentary scrutiny in exposing dangerous breakdowns in our criminal justice system.
Now that all three men are back in custody, the focus must turn immediately to the administrative and systemic failures that led to their unlawful release. The DA has submitted urgent Parliamentary questions to the Minister of Justice to determine:
- How the Department of Justice facilitated the release and transportation of these individuals from the Western Cape High Court, despite the court’s ruling; and
- Why subsequent court proceedings, including those related to assault charges, failed to account for their full criminal history.
These failures point to a troubling lack of coherence between the Department of Justice and the Department of Correctional Services and is an institutional blind spot that directly endangers public safety. The re-arrests do not resolve the matter; they merely confirm that what was dismissed as a “system error” was in fact a serious governance failure that must be addressed.
The DA will continue to pursue full accountability until systemic reforms are implemented to prevent such dangerous oversights from recurring.