DAINI APPLAUDS BUHARI, SAYS RENOVATION OF PRISONS TO BECOME CORRECTIONAL SERVICES, A DEPLETE TO SECURITY CHALLENGES IN NIGERIA.

As the Nigerian Correctional Service Bill was signed into Law by President Muhammadu Buhari, repealing the Nigerian Prisons Service Acts of 1972, the walls around the convicts shall be called correctional facilities, not prisons anymore.

Nice as it sounds, it took 11 years for the bill to scale through to become law, a primary indication of the reflections of a system that sees those behind the walls as the only prisoners in our society. But that apart, it’s good news that one of the biggest crime-breeding plants in our system has been demolished. But this also depends largely on whether the law exists on paper alone or its provisions will be attended to by the concerned departments.

In as much as the law is expected to put in place a framework for the rehabilitation and transformation of inmates and address inadequate funding for the prisons, full implementation of its provisions will help the society overcome crime recycles in the society through the outdated prisons system.

Most notorious criminals who mastermind biggest crimes are often ex-convicts. It is then smart for a government that is doing everything to curb crimes to also move our prisons from its current state of being a breeding ground for hardened criminals to the actual correctional confinements which the new law proposes. In the past, our society threw accused and convicted persons into prisons like we never expected them back in the free society, and when they come out, they unleash mayhem on the rest. The society needs to stand up and charge towards implementation of this new law for it to be effective because it is a victory for all, not just the prisoners.

The prison is part of the society. In some countries with better prison systems, the correctional system is helping them to reduce crime rates by discouraging its multiplier effects which characterised the old terrible prisons system in the country. All prisoners should have access to counsellors who check on them fortnightly to admonish them and check their correctional progress to prepare their come-back to the free society.

Correctional facilities are meant to be affiliated to academic institutions to enable inmates continue or start fresh educational programmes as normal persons. Convicted inmates can continue with their lives, even to the point of earning degrees, mastering vocational skills or industrial trainings that prepare them for a sustainable living after their prison terms. They must be enrolled in a standardised correction training programme and take e-courses that reconnects them to a free society. Prisoners are meant to be better in character and knowledge when they come out of incarcerations.

The new law provides for welfare of inmates and workers; it also empowers the state Comptroller of Prisons Service to reject new intakes where the prison in question is already filled to capacity. The provisions of the law are as well the biggest challenges our prison system has faced over time. While the erstwhile budgetary provisions went down the drain due to corrupt practices, a visit to our prisons will leave one with goose pimples and tears over the deplorable states the inmates were kept. It is better imagined talking about the size and healthcare facilities; predictably, no one is expected to come out of such incarceration as a friend of the free society but frustrated, wrecked and condemned.

A national institute that will develop correctional programmes for inmates and monitor their progress should be established as an independent agency away from the prison service administration. It should be a policy-oriented agency for learning, innovations and leadership centre that shapes and advances effective correctional practice for inmates across the nation.

One major crisis rocking the prisons management is our judicial system. People who commit lesser offences tend to stay long in prisons without trials, thereby turning them to become hardened criminals they were not meant to be; and this is how exactly our prisons have been converted to a breeding ground for hardened criminals who found their ways back into the society only to spread the virus far and wide particularly among the youths.

There are thousands of suspects awaiting trials but languishing in the prisons. There are other thousands who are still undergoing trials but already started prison terms; some have their trials inconclusive and serving limitless prison terms without sentence. The injustice against people wrongly and barbarically incarcerated in our prisons are enough a curse to impede progress of the nation. Their souls cry for justice every day in agony! It is pathetic and utterly inhuman to allow someone spend half his lifetime behind bars as mere suspect. It is absurd!

The national institute will also help on public advocacy to ensure re-orientation concerning inmates, making people to accept that prisons are part of the society, and that it is a correctional facility not just for punitive purpose but a place designed to shape offenders and return them back to the society with skills and attitudes that will help them to be useful and productive citizens.

To have better products from the correctional facilities, inmates’ limited rights to communication, good health care facilities and access to growth programme should be fully respected. Abusive and inhuman conditions at correctional facility violate prisoners’ rights against cruel and unusual punishment. Programmes on substance abuse, anger management, leisure management, volunteer services, chaplaincy, sex offender programmes and others are integral part of correctional facilities schemes.

Rights NGOs are usually incorporated into the correctional facility system and should function with the correctional federal institute. The word prisons or prisoners are utterly derogatory to the correctional objectives for which incarcerations are meant to fulfil. Great men have come out of prisons to be masters of industries and celebrities.

Kevin Mitnick was a former hacker who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list before launching his own security firm; Frank William Abagnale was a world-famous con man by age 21 but now runs his own private fraud consulting company. Former Nixon aide, Charles Colson spent a year in federal prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal and then started Prison Fellowship and Larry Jay Levine was sentenced to 10 years in prison but later used his prison experience to start his company, ‘Wall Street Prison Consultants’. What about Stephen Richards who spent nine years in prison for selling marijuana but later became professor of criminal justice in life?

The list of people who have been incarcerated and come out of prisons to become influential persons in the society is unlimited. It is arguable that where they served their prison terms is a significant factor on what they have become. It is often said jokingly that if Akon had served prison terms in Nigeria, his story would have been different entirely.

The new Minister for Interior Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola,  former governor of Osun State is a seasoned administrator and that experience is expected to serve as a big instrument at driving implementation of the new correctional service law which just came alive  as he takes the mantle of leadership in that sector.

What we make out of convicts have larger impacts on our society. In the end, the bigger walls of prisons are not the ones cast around people kept in national incarceration facilities, but the fears of insecurity our hearts are shrouded in when we remember that the danger posed by justice melted at other fellows in the society has grown to become a monster that terrorises everyone by the day.

Comrade Olusesan Daini
Chairman, Igbogbo/Bayeku LCDA