The NCS project started in 2008 in 18 sites and is now in 45 sites in all provinces except the North West province. We have certainly come a long way from the early stages of the project. We have learnt many difficult lessons and achieved some noteworthy milestones:
Important Lessons Learned:
- The critical importance of continuous stakeholder engagement to mitigate against the regular turn-over of court personnel.
- The necessity of having MOUs in place with DCS with regards to the referrals of correctional super-vision offenders.
- The difficulty of getting magistrates to support research that requires them to complete surveys.
- The constant challenges that affect the NCS service from social worker shortages, staff turnover and vacancies.
- The discomfort that many people feel regarding social media as learning tools, which explains why our online knowledge forum only has a handful of magistrates as members. The online knowledge forum is a free research and interaction tool that contains over 600 research entries on the subjects of legislation, sentencing practice, offender reintegration and best practice. Despite the dearth of easily accessible data for most South African criminal justice practitioners, to date we have only 134 members.
View it online HERE
To download, right-click HERE and select ‘save link as’.
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