Nigerian Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has decried the deplorable state of Nigerian prisons. In a scathing assessment, he said conditions are so bad that anyone who goes in comes out an animal.
Osinbajo, who was represented by the Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazzau stated this in Abuja during the official presentation of the Nigerian Prisons Survey Reports, a research work undertaken by Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action, PRAWA, in conjunction with Nigerian Prisons Service.
He said: “I visited the Port Harcourt prisons yesterday. While I was waiting for my flight, I chose to go to the prison. What I saw is a reflection of quite a lot of things in the survey.
“The Port Harcourt prison was built in 1918, meaning it will be 100 years old this year. For a very long time, our prisons had been neglected because that prison, when it was built in 1918 was meant to contain about 800 inmates, but today it is containing over 5,000 and I find that very disturbing.
“There was no room for prisoners and anybody who goes into that place as a human being is coming out as an animal. The major issue we are facing now is the population of those awaiting trial; pre-trial detention. Of the about 5, 000 inmates I saw in Port Harcourt prisons, over 3,700 were those awaiting trial and I spoke with a few of them as I was moving and I found that very many of them had been in prisons for five years upward without going to court. I tried to find out some of the reasons and I think in order to deal with this issue, there is the need for Departments of Public Prosecution, DPP, in the states to look at how the processes or what kind of procedures should be adopted in prosecuting criminal cases in this country.
Secondly, investigations by police or arrest procedures must be looked into in order to look at this situation because if investigation is poor, then prosecution will be defective.
Third is the court, they have a lot to do in terms of criminal trials. Cases are unnecessarily adjourned, though I know that there are over-lapping problems.”
Prison over-crowding is a direct product of deficits in the criminal process; a simplified and non-complex procedure where the constitution mandates the integrity of human rights and the formal direction for penal processors. Considering the socio-economic factors of holding an individual incarcerated, it is obvious that the combined purpose of justice is failed, as, according to the VP’s remark, ‘most go into prisons as humans but discharged as animals’; literally. So what’s to be done?
The Police need intensive training in humanistic approach towards the ‘offenders’ they encounter, not to brutalise or dehumanise. They require, as part of their enlistment course curriculum, the process of ‘reality-check’ to separate the chaff from the wheat. Many prospective awaiting trial persons are interrogated and evaluated as circumstantial offenders, in some cases, transparently innocent of wrong-doing. Nevertheless, they are are roped in by one excuse or the other reason to fill a much needed police charge record sheet.
The courts often tend not to bother with further assessment or investigation. The assumed due process of criminal law is often taken beyond the accordance of rights of the individual; thus, a mass incarceration into an unhealthy, animalistic containment. So where does the system strike a balance between containment and rehabilitation – which imprisonment has as its global aim. The reformative ideology, first off, is lacking while the punitive model of offender management takes a complete hold. One may wonder, statistically, how many apprehended offenders had gone through different penal process without feeling a duress of acceding to uncommitted crimes (torture), or coercive and hostile interrogation with resultant guilty plea before the courts.
The social welfare sector, unfortunately, is castigated as too humanistic, with rivalry between the system and other arms of the justice system. Not to mention NGO’s representing the welfare and well-being of offenders (real or manufactured).
The role of an independent body is to advise on individual cases emanating from the point of arrest, advise the policy makers on the most efficient approaches to reformative processing of offenders, the removal of arbitrary determination of the arresting agency, the diversionary options for the courts; etc. Mitigating factors are often neglected, if not abandoned in transit, without recourse how many innocent others may feel the affect of such miscarriage of justice-dependants, individual health, community participation and many more.
The prison service is thus left with the discretion to treat individual detained/incarcerated offenders subject to either their social class or material status. The imprisoned thus become the ‘cash-cow’ to individual charges within the system.
The government has left Penal reform for far too long that one of the deficits of a developing nation stands out poignantly in Nigeria’s case: human rights of offenders are of no significance to the government as it has a much higher priority in nation building than to factor humane treatment of offenders as a ‘selling point of nation building’. Question is: what can you do when you have an over-populated confine of ‘criminal’ individuals, with reduced manpower and abject resources to map out humane activities? Stay them in their holding confines and let the rule of ‘only the strong survive’ apply.
However, like school and energy infrastructures, health improvement investment and others significant to modernity the offender management system needs to be a prioritised focus to be invested in so that ‘those incarcerated can be released as positively changed persons’ who may contribute to the growth and development through several valued approaches to rehabilitation and resettlement of offenders. Punitive sanctions have less outcomes, rather it reinforces and or, recreates deviancy and recividism.
A good observation by the VP.