Monograph 75: Making Courts Work, A Review of the IJS Court Centre in Port Elizabeth, Martin Schonteich

Comparatively South Africa has one of the highest levels of recorded violent crime in the world. Beyond the direct death, misery and trauma crime inflicts on its victims, other consequences of crime include feelings of insecurity, disillusionment with the state’s ability to protect its citizens, vigilantism, emigration and reduced foreign investment. In short, crime has become one of the biggest impediments to the establishment of a free, prosperous and peaceful society in South Africa.

It is the purpose of the criminal justice system to combat, prevent and reduce crime. It seeks to do this by processing cases and offenders speedily and effectively and by handing down appropriate sentences to those convicted of an offence.

South Africa’s criminal justice system is not performing optimally. Of the 2.6 million crimes recorded in 2000 (and many crimes are never reported), only 8% resulted in the conviction and punishment of the perpetrators. The slow investigation and prosecution of cases is creating unmanageable numbers of awaiting trial prisoners. In early 2002 the country’s prisons had an approved occupancy level of 105,000, but were holding 175,000 inmates.

To address bottlenecks in the criminal justice process an Integrated Justice System (IJS) initiative was developed in the late 1990s with the objective of transforming the criminal justice system into a modern, efficient, effective and integrated system.

The flagship court management project of the IJS is the Court Process Project. However, this project has a long-term implementation timeframe. As an important interim solution, a semi-automated court and case management system was implemented at a number of courts where case backlogs were particularly high. This initiative, termed the IJS Court Centre Project, seeks to improve court and case management at magistrates’ court level.

The IJS Court Centre Project provides magistrates’ courts with an electronic case management system, together with more effective ways of organising the flow of work in the court environment. The Court Centre brings together all criminal justice role players in one physical environment, and facilitates co-operation between them to ensure that cases are better prepared for trial.

The New Law Courts in Port Elizabeth have been at the forefront of developing the IJS Court Centre Project in South Africa. One of the strengths of the Port Elizabeth IJS Court Centre is that it evolved gradually over time, adding components to the centre as its capacity expanded and additional role players committed themselves to the centre’s overall objective.

The vision of the IJS Court Centre at the Port Elizabeth New Law Courts is to drastically improve service delivery by:

The IJS Court Centre in Port Elizabeth incorporates the following concepts and initiatives:

The IJS Court Centre in Port Elizabeth successfully integrated the aforementioned projects and best practices. The Court Centre implemented a computer-based case roll management system in 2001 that keeps an electronic record of the whereabouts and status of every case in the system, including the status of the accused.

During 2001 the Court Centre processed 10,300 cases. Of these cases 3,682 were processed up to the point where they were ready for trial – an average of about 200 per month. This is an impressive figure given that the cases the centre processes include serious crimes such as murder, rape, aggravated robbery and fraud.

On average, in cases processed by the Court Centre, the number of days that passed between the accused person’s first appearance in court up to the point that the case was ready for trial, declined over the course of 2001. Between the first and fourth quarters of 2001, the average number of days between a first appearance in court and trial readiness decreased by over 40%.

Over a three-year period the IJS Court Centre in Port Elizabeth facilitated the release of some 1,700 awaiting trial accused from prison. This saved the various accused some 58,000 incarceration days. The Court Centre managed to avoid costs of almost R5 million for the corrections department over this period.

The Port Elizabeth Court Centre’s integrated approach, whereby representatives of four government departments are all given a role to play, is the key to the centre’s success. By closely involving them in the work of the centre, each of these departments takes on the responsibility of making a success of such a collaborative approach, thereby improving the service the departments deliver to the public and court users.

The Port Elizabeth Court Centre has a fifth partner which has been crucial to its success: organised business in the form of Business Against Crime (BAC). This is so for a number of reasons. Firstly, the BAC-appointed IJS project manager had the necessary neutrality and independence to get different government departments to work together for the greater good and ensure the success of the Court Centre. Secondly, the private sector is able to enhance skills and support capacity building within the South African criminal justice system through direct access to the business skills of sponsor companies.

Improving the day-to-day functioning of the criminal justice system is one of the most important, but also one of the most difficult, goals for policy makers to achieve. The IJS Court Centre in Port Elizabeth has achieved this goal in three short years. Through the entrepreneurial skills and financial backing of the private sector, and the enthusiasm and talent of a number of criminal justice employees, the centre has radically altered the way the criminal justice system works at an operational level at one of the country’s busiest courts.