Babies, moms, do hard time together

Michelle Jones

She shares the small space – containing a bed, mattress, toilet and sink – with her 13-month-old child.

Maryna Rhoda, 47, was four months pregnant when she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Pollsmoor Correctional Centre on a charge of defeating the ends of justice.

She said she had inadvertently been caught up in an escape from custody.

“I thought the judge was really unfair.

“This is really not a place for a mother and a baby,” Rhoda says as she sits on the bed with her son on her lap.

She was among a number of inmates the Cape Times interviewed yesterday as a team joined Correctional Services Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula on a visit to the centre to mark Child Protection Week.

Rhoda has been incarcerated for 18 months and expects to be paroled in four months time from the only home her young son has known.

Photographs, letters and other mementos are stuck up on the walls of the cell, with brightly-coloured toys placed throughout the space.

She says the cell is far too small for the two of them.

“The space is limited.

“There is no space for him.”

Pointing to the toilet, covered in protective fabric, Rhoda says: “This is his toy.

“This is where he plays.”

The cell is locked daily at 3pm and the two then have to spend the night enclosed in the tiny space.

“At 3pm we get locked up,” she says with a grimace as her son struggles off her lap.

Before she was arrested, she lived in Strand and worked as a pre-school teacher.

Waiting for Rhoda at home are her six other children.

She says her relationship with them has suffered while she has been in Pollsmoor and she looks forward to seeing them.

“We have lost a lot of time now.”

When the Cape Times team leaves the cell, Rhoda sits alone on the bed and her son lies crying on the floor.

Rhoda is one of 493 women incarcerated in Pollsmoor’s Female Correctional Centre.

Of these, fewer than half, 234, have been sentenced.

The facility is also occupied by 12 children.

Nine of the women there are pregnant and their shared cells are down the hall from the moms and children. One of these cells is crammed to capacity with six beds, a toilet and a sink.

The women, who are six to eight months pregnant, are all awaiting trial.

One tells the Cape Times she has been at Pollsmoor for two months because she is unable to pay R500 bail.

Another describes how she was unable to get hold of the paperwork to prove she was in Pollsmoor when she was supposed to have committed a crime.

michelle.jones@inl.co.za