The recent revelations that Thabo Bester, ‘The Facebook Rapist’, was not only running a business from his prison cell, but that he did not die in a fire in jail, and rather had escaped from Mangaung Prison, continue to occupy news headlines.

The Mangaung Correctional Centre is a privatised prison, run by G4S, the largest security firm in the world. Will they be held accountable for the overall shocking ‘governance’ of the prison? Is an inquiry long overdue? Does G4S represent a new colonialism, deriving profit off incarcerated black bodies?

Join investigative journalist Ruth Hopkins in conversation with Mandy Weiner on Monday, 3 April at 18:00 as they tackle these and other questions.

What exactly has been going on at Mangaung Prison, and for how long? And who knew? Ruth Hopkins’s extraordinary, brave book, The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison, is an exposé of the prison.

Hopkins’s story of a broken prison, in which inmates were forcibly given anti-psychotic drugs and tortured with electric shock ‘therapy’, also details the flow of money in and out of the prison.

“Written with gripping narrative force and meticulous research,The Misery Merchantsis a searing indictment of a far-reaching, vile injustice committed by a company making millions off the backs of human beings. For anyone who cares about the matrix of crises of our current world – mass incarceration, capitalism, government corruption – this book is a must read.”

– Baz Dreisinger, author of Incarceration Nations: A journey to justice in prisons around the world

Ruth Hopkins is an award-winning investigative journalist based in South Africa. She worked as a journalist and editor with the Wits Justice Project in Johannesburg from 2012 to 2018, producing content about wrongful convictions, lengthy remand detention, police brutality and various other criminal justice issues. Ruth wrote a book on trafficking women into Europe, I Will Never Let You Go Again (published in 2005), based on five years of research in Albania, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Her most recent book, The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison was published in 2020.

Award-winning journalist, Mandy Wiener is host of the Midday Report on 702 and writes a weekly column for EWN. She is the author of Killing Kebble, My Second Initiation, Ministry of Crime, co-author of Behind the Door: The Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp Story and series editor of The Youngsters,which features several young South African voices. Her latest book, The Whistleblowers, advocates for a societal revolution in how we treat and protect those who speak truth to power in South Africa.

#ThaboBester and the scourge of privatised prisons