After more than 8 years of majority rule, South Africa is still the country in Africa that imprisons the highest proportion of its people; worldwide it is still outranked in this area only by the United States, Russia, some other republics of the former Soviet Union, and a few small countries with populations of less than one million. In the first years of the new government there were intensive efforts to transform the Department of Correctional Services. Hope for a policy and strategy that would reduce the use of imprisonment soon evaporated, however. The immediate cause for the loss of hope was a widespread public perception that crime was out of control. The response from politicians across the spectrum of political interests was to impose greater restrictions in the granting of bail to high-risk offenders and mandate longer and harsher sentences for serious offenders. The politicians failed to base their crime control policies on research into the actual level and types of crimes being committed in South Africa. In fact, until the late 1990's there was no significant increase in the number of cases processed in the criminal justice system, and there was a decline in the number of offenders found guilty. It would have been possible under these conditions to implement a reduction in the prison population shortly after the introduction of majority rule. Although the call for harsher sentences has subsided, there are still strategies in place that have the tendency to increase rather than decrease the prison population. These strategies are briefly discussed. This chapter proposes reducing pretrial detention by requiring police and prosecution services to bear the cost of detaining prisoners prior to trial as part of their budgets. Regarding sentencing policy, measures should be adopted to ensure that courts do not impose sentences that in aggregate result in major prison overcrowding. Ad hoc measures that attempt to replace short-term sentences with alternatives to imprisonment are not sufficient to bring prison populations down to manageable proportions. A campaign to reduce the prison population to manageable levels should focus on the greater use of shorter sentences when a prison sentence is deemed necessary at all. 39 references and 32 notes