The parole system – again in the spotlight after it was discovered that one of the accused in the Gumtree murder was a parolee with a violent rap sheet – is crumbling, with not enough officers to supervise offenders on their release, critics say.

The DA’s James Selfe said on Tuesday that the current system made it easy for them to commit more crimes.

Selfe, the DA’s spokesman on Correctional Services, said there were too few parole officers to oversee offenders once they were released.

“Supervision is not as good as it should be and parolees frequently resort to crime,” Selfe said.

Celia Dawson, deputy chief executive of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and Reintegration of Offenders (Nicro), said there were no figures of how many parolees re-offended, but she agreed with Selfe, saying there was a shortage of parole officers and that falling back into crime was easy.

Dawson said prison was meant to be a place of rehabilitation, but without enough social workers and psychologists it remained a challenge to rehabilitate criminals.

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