INVESTIGATION: CELLING OUT

Marius Boarden, founder and CEO of he Pollsmoor Broadcasting Network (PBN), shares his thoughts

How did the PBN come about? After spending two years counselling offenders at Pollsmoor Prison, I felt that we were only touching the tip of the iceberg. I thought about how we could reach more people and the idea of starting a radio station was born. At the time, the only equipment I had was a portable CD walkman and 20 CDs. We proposed this to the Correctional Services Department and they eventually approved. We plugged our CD walkman into the juvenile intercom system of Pollsmoor and began broadcasting to 1 700 juvenile offenders. Pollsmoor Radio Station 1 (PRS1), later known as Truth Radio, was born. Later we expanded our services to include music and TV production and PBN became the encapsulating body.

What’s the PBN vision? We’d like to be world leaders in offender rehabilitation and moral rejuvenation by creating prison cultures that change lives for the better. Our mission is utilise radio and TV in a meaningful way to positively impact offenders en masse. This we do by removing negative media influences and replacing them with positive ones, producing programmes by offenders for offenders and offering skills development and employment to both current and former prisoners

How much has PBN accomplished? We’ve achieved a lot over the past 12 years. Of the 125 inmate students we’ve trained, we only know of fewer than 20% who’ve returned to jail. This is quite good, considering that SA’s recidivism rate is around 70%. We’ve also received hundreds of letters from offenders who’ve been impacted by the programmes we broadcast. However, all this will pale in comparison with what we’ll accomplish if we get the go-ahead from Correctional Services to launch our next division – a dedicated prison TV station for SA.

What challenges are you facing? Full co-operation from Correctional Services and lack of funding. Correctional Services is still coming to terms with the idea of having a media-related organisation working within its facilities on a daily basis. Bad publicity for the department from other media avenues makes our work more difficult, as it becomes far more cautious in what it allows us to do and guest access becomes more restrictive.
Finding funding is exceptionally difficult. Society generally looks only at the crimes that were committed and the subsequent punishment for the perpetrators. People understandably find it difficult to look beyond the past and into the future. They therefore see little reason to put their hard-earned money behind criminals. However, they forget that one day, virtually every offender in SA will be released. If their time in prison isn’t utilised productively, they’ll return there after having committed even worse crimes. Rehabilitation isn’t Correctional Services’ responsibility alone – it’s shared by society.

Where do you get funding? Purely from donations. Chevron is our largest sponsor and has supported us for the past nine years. However, we’ve always had a huge lack of funding, which has meant we’ve been unable to employ skilled staff, forcing me to do most of the work on the ground. It’s virtually impossible to do this and generate funding as well.
Society seems to forget how influential criminals are in our country. They’re the reason we live behind high walls, barbed wire and electric fences, with armed response units on call. By turning around the life of just one individual behind bars, we can minimise crime in our own lives.

Who offers training to PBN? We have skilled volunteers who offer training on limited time, but I do most of the training myself. Ideally, we’d like to employ a full-time lighting cameraman and video editor, but that would cost us more than our current entire annual budget.

Are the inmates remunerated? No, but it would be nice if could put some money away for our inmate students to kick-start their new lives on the outside. When they go out with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their back, they’re more likely to turn to crime than if they had something to tide them over for the first few months after their release.

What sort of skills do they learn? For the first nine years, we taught them skills in radio and music production. Since 2008, we’ve been training them in TV production. This is a very practical course where we utilise broadcast video equipment to train them in various disciplines, from camerawork to location sound, lighting, scriptwriting and conceptualisation.

Do you sell your content to mainstream media? No, we don’t have permission from Correctional Services to do that. But we’d like to be commissioned by broadcasters to produce a series that could educate society about the real situation behind bars.

Do you keep in touch with ex-offenders? We try to, but it’s not always possible. One of our ex-students has been teaching English in China for three years; a second guy’s working in the film industry, and others are furthering their studies at tertiary institutions.

To read the full version of this story, go to page 34 of the January-February 2012 issue.