Prisoners share life lessons with Westcol students
This was part of the Youth Month programme in which inmates engaged the visitors in a dialogue on matters affecting youth and men. While it was a first-time encounter for most of the visitors, it was business as usual for library personnel Thandeka Legae and Rosinah Ramaleba.
'Before the Youth Month programme, we visit the correctional services every Tuesday for an outreach to engage inmates in various literacy-related programmes, including competitions, debates and others,' said Thandeka.
'In most of our interactions with the inmates, they would express heartbreaking reasons for how they landed in the facility,' added Rosinah.
Thandeka and Rosinah mentioned how impressed they were with the way inmates articulated themselves in subjects like the current inflation, the dollar-rand exchange, etc.
'This first-time outreach was more of a dialogue than a competition, and both the visitors and inmates engaged robustly and constructively.'
Thandeka spoke of a touching moment where one inmate described how he had been incarcerated for 25 years due to bad decisions.
'It was also fascinating to have inmates clearly outlining the current socio-economic dynamics despite being incarcerated in a corrections facility on topics ranging from information technology to GBV to substance abuse and how they affect the social landscape.'
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