A 53-year-old man was sentenced to life imprisonment this week in the Richards Bay Regional Court for raping a young boy.
Fana Mbuyazi, who was charged with unlawfully and intentionally committing an act of sexual penetration on the eight-year-old victim, pleaded guilty.
Mbuyazi was caught in the act of sodomising the boy at a Kwambonambi homestead on 16 October 2008 by the victim’s mother.
Leap in lengthy sentences
Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) released the latest South Africa Survey and revealed that life sentences increased by almost 1 900% between 1995 and 2012, while sentences of five and seven years declined by 53% over the same period.
The IRR sourced the data from the Department of Correctional Services and from the Presidency’s Development Indicators.
The increase in the number of inmates serving longer sentences is a direct consequence of the Criminal Law (Sentencing) Amendment Act of 1997, which provided for mandatory minimum sentencing for persons convicted of identified serious crimes.
Kerwin Lebone of the IRR’s research department said, ‘This means that prisons are increasingly populated by inmates who stay longer rather than by new convicts, but the law does not seem to deter perpetrators from committing serious crimes.
The rate of aggravated robbery has increased by 25% between 1997, the year in which the minimum sentence legislation was introduced, and 2013.’
Lebone said global trends had shown that the certainty of being arrested, a key feature of efficient police detective work, as well as sound crime preventive measures, were more effective deterrents of crime than long sentences.
