Judged by the parlous state of its prisons, Nigeria is a nasty and underdeveloped country feigning to be developing. It is a failing state where the prisons are overcrowded, filthy and underfunded. Their dysfunctional condition has prompted President Muhammadu Buhari to call for a change. This is a good omen if the President’s belated alarm becomes a catalyst for strategic reforms.
Nigeria’s prisons mirror a broken society struggling vainly to reform its miscreants. In a note to Court of Appeal and Supreme Court Justices, Buhari succinctly captured the state of the prisons, describing them as a national disaster. “We need a new approach to prison congestion,” Buhari said. “It is a national scandal that many of our prisons are overcrowded by up to 90 per cent.” This is the dangerous reality and goes against the tenets of justice and civilisation.
The Nigerian prison system is out of whack because government has not reengineered what it inherited from the colonialists, who constructed the first gaol in 1872. Today, there are just 144 prisons and an additional 83 satellite prisons in the country, according to Nigerian Prisons Service statistics. This is inadequate because the rate of population explosion is faster than that of the expansion in prisons facilities. There has also been an upsurge in crime rate, with robbery, kidnapping and Islamist terrorism reaching disquieting heights.
As a result, the prison no longer serves the purpose of reforming offenders. Minors are locked up with hardened criminals; petty offenders suffer similarly cruel fate. The cells are swarming with repeat offenders, who find it hard to re-adjust to a tough society that has no sustainable programmes for their rehabilitation. They acquire dangerous habits in prison and return to torment the society.
In all, the NPS Controller-General, Ahmed Ja’afaru, says that as of March, 68,250 people were behind bars. However, only 32 per cent (or 21,903) of the inmates had been convicted. This means 46,351 people (or 68 per cent), who were awaiting trial were putting the system under avoidable stress. There should be a solution to this abnormality.
For example, the Kirikiri Prisons in Lagos, which was built to accommodate 1,700 inmates, had 3,553 as of June, over-shooting its capacity by 1,853 inmates. Many pregnant female prisoners are forced to deliver their babies in jail. The children live there with their incarcerated mothers. This is a cruel fate for these innocent children.
Abysmal prison conditions trigger diverse crises, two of which are riots and jailbreaks. In a pathetic case in September, a detainee at the Ogwashi-Uku Prison, Delta State, Smart Ohuzu, died after the prison authorities allegedly refused him medical treatment.
At the height of the Boko Haram insurgency, jailbreaks were rampant. In September 2010, over 700 inmates escaped during a Boko Haram attack on the Bauchi Prisons. Between June and August 2016, jailbreaks occurred in the Kuje Medium Prison (FCT); the Koton Karfe Minimum Prison (Kogi State); the Nsukka Prison (Enugu State); and the Abakaliki Prisons (Ebonyi State). NPS officials often blame the breaches on congestion. In the Abakaliki Prisons, for instance, a facility built for 300 now accommodates 1,000 inmates. The Port Harcourt Prisons in Rivers State, built in 1918 for 804 prisoners, now houses 3,849, with 3,356, representing 87.19 per cent, awaiting trial. This is a recipe for disaster.
More than that, Nigerian prisons are now a breeding ground for felons. This should not be. Notorious detainees coordinate their criminal activities from there in connivance with crooked NPS warders. Last March, Henry “Vampire” Chibueze, brought this evil point home by coordinating his kidnapping activities from the Owerri Prisons in Imo State. Last week, the Oyo State Police Command arrested two members of an armed robbery gang who confessed that their activities in the South-West were being coordinated by an inmate of the Ibara Prison, Abeokuta, Ogun State.
There are roughly nine million people incarcerated worldwide in what is described as terrifying “pits of chaos and despair.” But governments around the world are taking a more holistic approach to crime by making prison systems truly humane. The life behind the walls should be as much like life outside the walls as possible. Norway, for instance, focuses on rehabilitating its criminals instead of punishing them. “We don’t think about revenge in the Norwegian prison system. We have much more focus on rehabilitation. It is a long time since we had fights between inmates,” says a Norwegian prison official.
Our prison system too is in need of urgent reforms, which should start with the NPS: all crooked officials who aid and abet detainees to commit crime should be fished out and made to face justice. Allegations of extortion of prisoners’ visitors are also rife. The government cannot escape investing in the system.
In France, the government has employed two different solutions. First, government is building more prisons. Second, prison privatisation is gaining momentum: more than a third of the prisons in France have now been privatised. The privatisation trend began in 1980 in the United States. It has caught on in the United Kingdom, Belgium and other parts of Europe.
In Germany, convicts work in daytime jobs, returning to the prison every evening. In the UK, prisoners are tagged while on parole and those of good conduct are released before they are supposed to complete their sentence. There, community service sentencing for minor offences has become a part of the justice system. Nothing prevents Nigeria from adopting the same practice.
Buhari has to walk his talk and trigger the implementation of the proposal by the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, to establish courts inside the prisons. His should not end at mere rhetoric, like his predecessors. This will eliminate the logistic problems dogging the system. State chief judges should step up on their tours to the prisons to vet the cases there and release those locked up unjustly; and minors, too. Earlier this year, Lagos State caused 209 underage prisoners to be released. They were in jail for minor offences like hawking and crossing the expressway. All those whose case files are missing or those who should have completed their prison terms if they had been properly convicted; and those being detained on spurious charges, like wandering, should be released and re-integrated into the society.
Apart from speeding up the construction of modern prison complexes, the executive and the National Assembly should collaborate to excise Prisons from the Exclusive Legislative List. This provision of the 1999 Constitution hampers state governments and private operators from running prison operations. The parliament should amend the constitution to permit states and local governments to operate prisons.
