REFORMATION: Aregbesola’s Jail Decongestion Move Deserves Swift Action

 

• Being an editorial of PUNCH Newspaper, Tuesday, October 18, 2022 edition

IT is an open secret that Nigeria’s notoriously overcrowded prisons — rechristened as correctional centres in 2019 — need a comprehensive decongestion strategy. In a fresh acknowledgement of this open sore, the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, has just enunciated a programme that aims to facilitate the quick release of 30 per cent of the detainees. According to him, the ministry will collaborate with the 36 states to achieve the goal. This is a welcome initiative deserving of total stakeholder support. The major challenge for Aregbesola is to ensure a quick and efficient implementation.

Given successive Nigerian governments’ dreadful record in seeing through desirable policies, the minister and the state governors should strongly resolve to make a difference with this initiative.

Evidence abounds that many Nigerians are wrongly incarcerated. From those arrested by callous police officers on flimsy grounds, often on legally undefined offences, to the sluggish justice system, a high percentage of inmates have no business behind bars. Aregbesola should do all within his power to get such detainees out quickly.

At 46.6 per cent, stealing is reportedly the leading crime in Nigeria, followed by assault, at 19.9 per cent. These are cases that the judiciary should dispense with quickly. Rather, it allows these suspects to overburden the correctional centres and the taxpayer.

The statistics are grim. Many detainees languish in jail for years without the benefit of a trial. As of October 10, there were 76,031 persons behind bars in the 253 custodial centres nationwide, out of which 74,432 are males and 1,599 females, says the Nigerian Correctional Service. This data does not explain the prevailing unjustness at the custodial centres.

Bizarrely, 53,063 persons, representing 70 per cent of the detainees, are awaiting trial. This leaves 22,968 persons or just 30 per cent as the convicts. This is excessively disproportionate; prisons are primarily meant to keep out convicts from harming society, not to punish innocent persons accused of crime. The law presumes everyone is innocent unless otherwise pronounced by a competent court; keeping suspects in jail interminably, therefore, is an egregious human rights violation. To worsen the laxity, those condemned to death are usually not executed or pardoned.

Over time, this has aggravated the social conditions in the prisons. Dangerously, minor offenders and petty thieves are locked up together with hardened criminals, in some cases, even with bloodthirsty terrorists. In the July 5 attack on the Kuje Correctional Centre in the FCT, terrorists freed over 800 persons, including 69 Boko Haram detainees.

Lumping diehard terrorists with those arrested for minor infractions has consequences. At other centres, non-violent offenders and minors are incarcerated with violent kidnappers, militants, and armed robbers. Giving a first-hand experience, Joshua Dariye, a former governor of Plateau State, who was recently granted state pardon, recalled, “If you take people to a correctional centre, you are supposed to come out reformed, not hardened. Most of the young men there come out worse than when they went in, and I don’t think that’s the essence of taking people to prison.”

Therefore, petty offenders not only end up crowding the prisons, but they also graduate to become more hardened. It is a primary reason for escalating recidivism in the country. While South Africa has a re-offending rate of 87-90 per cent, a 2019 report by the European Journal of Scientific Research said the rate of recidivism for singles was 58.4 per cent. With no visible programmes, either at the centre or at the sub-national level to reintegrate them into the community, they become a potent threat to society.

The success of Aregbesola’s proposal depends on other institutions cooperating – the state governors, the judiciary, and the police. According to him, 90 per cent of the awaiting trial persons committed state offences. “I have written to the Nigerian Governors Forum to allow me to come and address them on how they can support the process of decongestion,” the minister said. In the little time he has left in office, he should pursue the project with vigour.

Simultaneously, Nigeria needs to implement wide-ranging custodial reforms, the goal of the rebranding by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.). Among other things, the Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 empowers a state controller of the NCoS to reject intakes if a correctional centre is filled up. This is a pragmatic provision that if strictly implemented, will dissuade the police, who recklessly arrest people or do the bidding of egotistical VIPs filing flippant complaints against innocents.

Ultimately, Nigeria should carry out a constitution amendment. Illogically, the 1999 Constitution puts prisons on the Exclusive Legislative List, an anomaly in a federation. The prisons should be devolved such that there will be federal, state and/or local correction centres.

Undoubtedly, Nigeria’s custodial centres are horrible pigsties. Avoiding this, many countries prioritise prison reform. The World Population Review recommends the Norwegian reform model, a system it describes as the best globally. There, the prisons resemble country homes with no iron bars. In Norway, recidivism is reckoned to be the lowest in the world. Prisoners can cook their own food, wear their own clothes (no prison uniforms), use computers, TVs, undertake academic activities and entertain conjugal visits.

Likewise, in Germany, inmates are given time to go home at weekends. China, reputed for a low incarceration figure, promotes the writing of reflexive autobiographies to re-orientate the minds of inmates to decent causes.

In a devolved system, these are ideals that the federal and state governments should pursue. States especially should design and implement programmes to reduce recidivism, mount campaigns against stigmatisation of ex-convicts and help them with a means of livelihood. Governments should build more correctional centres to aid decongestion; minors should never be herded into prisons but placed in hospitable remand homes.

The police hierarchy should clamp down on its officers who arrest persons thoughtlessly; magistrates should investigate cases in detail before sending suspects to prison. State chief judges and governors should exercise their mandates to regularly visit prisons and police detention cells to release those deserving of early release.