Juvenile Justice

The historic year of 1910, which was marked by South Africa's unification, saw an attempt to develop a national prison and punitive policy. This goal was encapsulated within the 13th Act of 1911 (Prisons and Reformatories Act) as well as within the establishment of a Prisons Department. The Act served to revoke, partially or completely, every penal system-related law in place within the country's four colonies prior to its unification (i.e., laws implemented between 1902 and 1910) (Singh, 2005).

Nooshin Erfani-Ghadimi claims that prisons in the nation are often overpopulated, thereby overburdening their ventilation, sanitation, and healthcare facilities. Single cells may be used to house three inmates while the communal cells that are meant to house forty inmates may be packed with twice that amount of inmates, forcing them to sleep in triple or double bunks (Smith-Spark, 2014). Brazil's Justice Ministry is in charge of the nation's prison system, whose management comes under National Penitentiary Department duties.

In the year 2013, the nation's prisons housed 581,000 inmates, making its incarcerated population the 4th largest worldwide. Of these, 557,000 were held in jails while the rest were detained within police facilities. Brazil's prison system comprises of a total of 1,598 facilities. Every single one of these is excessively overpopulated. On account of the nation's glaring failure in managing its prison system, particularly in terms of capacity, private investors were invited to invest in Brazil's prison system.

Most Brazilian incarceration facilities are state-managed with the remaining being under Federal Government management. They are equipped to keep extremely dangerous convicts found guilty of engaging in organized criminal activities at bay (Bruha, 2015). Indian prisons and prison administrations fall under the jurisdiction of state governments. The Indian Constitution's Schedule VII (State List), Item IV addresses this area. State governments are solely in charge of prison administration and management, which is regulated by the 1894 Prisons Act as well as individual states' Prison manuals (Ali, 2014).

Prisons in India also suffer from overcrowding. The average day of an inmate is tough. A majority of them remain waiting for word, and visits, from family members and lawyers. Indian prison healthcare facilities and the psychological assessment of inmates may be deemed as being at the most basic stage. Nevertheless, the prison system in the nation incorporates a mechanism that allows jailed convicts to communicate directly with judges and resolve any problems they face.

There are a few features that are common to Indian, South African and Brazilian prison systems. Firstly, each of these nations' prison systems is burdened by overcrowding issues. Overcrowding and a large number of imprisonment sentences do not necessarily mean growing crime. A key reason behind this issue is the overemployment of the feature of pretrial detention. A few high-crime nations display high incarceration rates but there are many that exhibit low incarceration rates and do not suffer from overcrowding issues.

The above inter-country differences may be explained by the fact that the prison systems of diverse nations show diverse reactions to crime trends. A few systems might typically react to crime trend changes by modifying prison policies, whilst others might not be as reactive to crime changes and adopt alternate response strategies (Lappi-Seppala, 2010). A second commonality in the aforementioned nations' prison systems is the prison labor issue.

Individuals found guilty of a particular offense and accorded a jail sentence will probably be made to suffer hardships by being forced to work in a number of areas within and outside the prison. This serves as a supply of cheap labor to the nation and aims to transform the convict's thoughts from criminal thinking to a more constructive civilian thinking. Finally, South African, Indian and Brazilian prison systems are distributed between numerous kinds of facilities established based on the nature of the convict's crime.

A majority of white collar convicts are typically placed in well-conditioned facilities while petty offenders are placed in horrid, overcrowded facilities. In spite of the many commonalities observed in different nations' prison systems, a few differences do exist. Firstly, South African and Indian prison systems fall under the Justice Department's jurisdiction while four of Brazil's incarceration centers are privately managed. The private investors subject criminals to numerous legal activities and penalties in place for them. A second difference is with regard to prison system reforms.

In the days of Nelson Mandela's reign, a slow transformation occurred in the South African justice and crime department. South African prisons became correctional facilities instead of felon dens the way they are in Brazil and India. Furthermore, Indian prisons house more detainees waiting for trial than housed in any Brazilian or South African prison. Most nations across the globe automatically place any individual found guilty of perpetrating a major.