The revelation recently by Kaduna State Comptroller of Prisons, Mr. Abubakar Garba, that the Kaduna prison complex built in 1915 to accommodate 547 prisoners is now housing over 1,000 inmates and that there are only two functional vans for conveying about 800 awaiting trial inmates to court may make no difference to many Nigerians conversant with the eyesore the nation’s prison condition has been for decades. Indeed, the picture is more pathetic in several other prison facilities. But that President Muhammadu Buhari has directed state governors across the country to ensure the reduction of the number of prison inmates in their various domains, according to Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, makes a whole lot of sense, especially if eventually accomplished. During a working visit to the Kaduna prisons, el-Rufai said Buhari instructed all governors to visit prisons and ensure they reduced to the barest minimum those that have spent many years awaiting trial in courts nationwide.
Official figures say, about 56,785 inmates are languishing in the country’s 239 prisons. While 18,042 inmates or 32 per cent are real convicts, 38,743 others or 68 per cent are awaitingtrial detainees; out of which about 3,240 have been ‘awaiting trial’ for upward of four years. As at June 2013, 1,484 condemned prisoners or eight per cent of the total number of convicts were on the death row nationwide; 531 were serving life sentences; short term sentences 8,591 and long term 7,436. If the total number rotting as awaiting trial prisoners is sifted from real convicts, the nation’s prisons would probably not be quite hospitable, but they certainly will not be as congested as they now are.
Prisons all over the world are meant to serve as rehabilitation and reformatory institutions that assist inmates on completion of their terms to turn out as useful members of the larger society. But Nigerian prisons are yet to serve this purpose. For, while prisoners in advanced countries are treated with dignity and their rights respected, their counterparts in Nigeria are subjected to all manners of inhuman treatment, including the denial of their fundamental human rights, which make more hardened criminals of them than reformed people, post-custody. Their abodes are dingy and overcrowded. Porous security, poor living conditions, inadequate facilities and staffing, low staff morale and poor funding are some of the signposts of Nigerian prisons.
As a result, the frustrating prison situation boils over from time to time as jailbreaks or deliberate attempts, sometimes in broad daylight, by hoodlums to free their colleagues being held behind bars. The country experienced 10 of such assaults in the past five years, the fallout was the escape of over 2, 270 inmates from nine prisons – Enugu (2009); Bauchi (2010); Kaduna (2010); Benin City (2012); Sagamu (2013); Maiduguri (2011); Konton Karfe (2014) – the latter earlier came under Boko Haram assault on February 26, 2012; Lagos (2014) and Minna (2014) – between 2009 and 2014.
The Federal Government had set up and received the reports of several committees on the nagging problem. Among the recommendations made to the government were adequate funding of the prison service, adherence to international standards in prison management, and improvement in justice administration to eliminate delay in the dispensation of justice. But it is common knowledge that half measures and shoddy implementation of recommendations are symptomatic of governance in the country. Several nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have also sponsored bills to compel the sanitization of the Nigerian prison system, like the Prisons Act Amendment Bill, Community Service Bill, Victims’ Rights Bill and Anti- Discrimination Bill, all aimed at comprehensive prison reforms in the country, but to no avail since 1999 when the 4th Republic kicked off.
Therefore, this is no time for sponsoring needless conferences, workshops and tours on the menace at huge expense to the government ostensibly in search of facts that are readily available. With sufficient government commitment to addressing the key challenges besetting the prison system, and the cooperation of the judiciary through ensuring speedy trial of pending cases, the Nigerian prison system can be saved from further degeneration.
