- The call on inmates of Kirikiri Maximum Prisons to pay for transportation to courts is obnoxious and should be reversed immediately
Reports that inmates of the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison awaiting trial in courts in Lagos are being made to pay the cost of transporting them whenever their cases come up for mention shows how callous the system has become. The inmates, already deprived of their freedom sometimes for years, are not only dehumanised and traumatised, but treated as if they were already convicts. Authorities of the prisons see the inmates as criminals and fail to admit the legal maxim that any accused remains a mere suspect until proven guilty by a court of law, and should be accorded the respect due every citizen.
Wide-ranging prison reforms are due if the unlucky ones remanded there are to be seen as mere suspects and even those convicted treated as people being made to undergo rehabilitation. As it is today, by the policy of inflicting more punishment on those being tried, justice is being denied them. They are cut off from their means of livelihood and yet made to make payments. Where are they expected to raise the money in an unfriendly economy? Many of the inmates have been abandoned by friends, associates and families. The trauma is enough to make them lose their minds; and then this iniquitous policy.
The inhuman treatment being meted to these inmates is responsible for the growing incidence of jailbreak. In 2014 alone, prisoners and prison inmates broke loose in Lokoja, Ado-Ekiti and Kirikiri, Lagos, among others. The reasons could not be far from the poor welfare and sanitation systems in the prisons. In Lagos, the awaiting trial cells are always bursting at the seams, yet the Federal Government saddled with the responsibility of maintaining the prisons and caring for inmates has been doing nothing. In some cases, female prisoners are known to have been impregnated while in custody and infants are in other cases found with their mothers in the very unfriendly prison environment.
We find it unacceptable that innocent persons sent to prison pending when the overcrowded courts would be able to accommodate them are being turned to hardened criminals by the same state expected to administer justice. We, therefore, call on the in-coming Buhari administration to accord a special place to a reform of the entire justice system. It is a system that remands people in prison custody sometimes for more than five years before taking them to court. Some die in the process and the prerogative of mercy exercised by governors and chief judges have proved grossly inadequate in ensuring that justice is dispensed, the guilty duly punished and the innocent freed.
It is a hallowed maxim that ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. The new policy can only prolong the time cases spend before overworked judges. And, rather than resolve such delayed cases in favour of the accused in accordance with the philosophy that the innocent must be protected at all times, they are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and the burden is stacked against them by legal procedures and technicalities.
We suggest that the state be made to pay good compensation to accused wrongly remanded in prison as a way of reducing the abuse being suffered by citizens.
