Parole in South Africa is decided by Correctional Supervision and Parole Boards, which sit at correctional centres rather than as one national office. There is no single parole board number: the Department of Correctional Services call centre is the general route, and each board is reached through its own correctional centre or management area.
Official contact channels
- Tshegetso Call Centre: 0860 000 327
- Enquiries and complaints: [email protected]
- Online ticket system: dcs.gov.za/contactcentre/
- Departmental switchboard: 012 307 2998 or 012 307 2999
Services and responsibilities
A Correctional Supervision and Parole Board considers whether a sentenced offender may be placed on parole or under correctional supervision, and it also deals with the conditions attached to that placement. Each board has a chairperson, a vice chairperson and a secretary, and is attached to a correctional centre or management area rather than serving a whole province. The Department of Correctional Services publishes its parole board directory by region, covering Gauteng, the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, the Western Cape, the Free State and Northern Cape, and Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North West. It states that the call centre serves members of the public, inmates and officials.
Office and address information
The departmental head office is at 124 WF Nkomo Street, on the corner of WF Nkomo and Sophie De Bruyn Streets, in the Poyntons Building West Block, Pretoria, 0001, with post to Private Bag X136, Pretoria, 0001. Because boards sit at correctional centres, correspondence about a specific inmate normally goes to the postal address of the board attached to that centre, which the departmental directory publishes alongside each board.
Applications and escalation
Two cautions about the published parole board directory. First, most of the contacts it lists are individual officials, namely the named chairperson, vice chairperson and secretary of each board, and in at least one entry the address given is a personal Gmail account rather than a departmental one, so treat those as individual working addresses that change with the postholder rather than as stable board contacts. Second, the directory sets out telephone and fax numbers in adjacent columns, so confirm which is which before dialling. The call centre and the enquiries mailbox are the more reliable general route. If a complaint about correctional services is not resolved by the department, the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services is the independent body that inspects correctional centres and deals with inmate complaints, and maladministration by a national department can be taken to the Public Protector.
Sources
- Department of Correctional Services supervision and parole boards directory: dcs.gov.za/?page_id=1829
- Tshegetso Call Centre and complaints channels: dcs.gov.za/?page_id=4849