A practice note for Heritage Day · Reverend Michael Pillay
The statutory framework
Reverend Michael Pillay began spiritual-care work at Durban Westville Correctional Centre in October 1989. He remained in that post for nearly four decades and provided services to male and female sentenced and unsentenced inmates under successive chaplains and Area Commissioners. Westville is among the largest correctional complexes in the country. Rehabilitation work there is continuous, not occasional.
Section 16 of the Correctional Services Act 111 of 1998 requires the Department to provide correction, development and care. Section 14 protects freedom of religion, belief and opinion inside a centre. Spiritual care is one of the statutory services through which an offender may be prepared for release and through which the risk of reoffending may be addressed.
What must be recorded
The conviction records the offence. The sentence records the legal consequence. The correctional file records what programmes, work and interventions will be applied during the term. Those records serve different functions. If the court’s reasons do not separate them, the Department has no usable instruction for case management.
Programmes used in that period included structured courses such as The Transformed Life and Heartlines’ Nothing for Mahala, together with individual counselling. For a later court or a parole board, the material fact is not the course title. It is whether attendance, completion and any recorded change in conduct appear on the file.
Reverend Michael Pillay — spiritual-care worker, Durban Westville Correctional Centre, 1989–2026.
Restorative justice as a case-management tool
Restorative justice, as applied inside a centre, is a sequenced process: the offence is identified; responsibility is admitted where it is established; harm to the complainant and to the community is recorded; and — only where it is safe and the complainant consents — a structured dialogue or mediation may follow. Relatives may be recorded as secondary victims. The process does not replace the sentence. It produces a plan the Department can monitor.
Section 10 of the Constitution continues to apply after conviction. Section 35 continues to apply to unsentenced accused persons held in the same centre. Dignity remains a legal standard for the administration of the sentence. Where the term includes no work assignment, no skills programme and no recorded intervention, the file will not assist a later parole or placement decision.
A note from Reverend Michael Pillay
I served as a spiritual-care worker at Durban Westville Correctional Centre from October 1989 until 2026. In that period I provided structured programmes and individual counselling to sentenced and unsentenced inmates, both male and female. Rehabilitation, as administered in a centre, is the recorded process of correction, development and care required by the Correctional Services Act. A sentence that contains no programme, no work assignment and no written plan leaves the Department with little to implement beyond custody.
Restorative justice is of use only where responsibility is established, the complainant consents, and the centre can supervise the process. It does not replace the sentence. It produces a plan that can be monitored until release or placement. Judicial officers assist that work when reasons record programme history, assessed risk, family circumstances and any condition that can be enforced. Section 276 remains available where correctional supervision, or a suspended sentence with specified programmes, is the appropriate order. The request I would make of the bench is limited: write the sentence so that the Department can administer it.
The note above is published in Reverend Pillay’s name for this edition. It is not a practice directive. A sentence still has to be administered after the court rises.