Nigerian Prison: Reformative Centers Or Dead End

I woke up with a thought this morning 'what can i write about that is entertainment free?' People deserve to know what is going on around them. So many injustice in the world today and i say to myself 70% of it is in Nigeria.... So i chose to talk about Nigerian Prisons. Am sure some of you can be like i have no one there but in Nigeria, we can not predict what is going to happen next.

How do convicts and prison officials fare? A prison is a correctional facility for people who have committed a felony against the society they live. Ideally they are reformative centres but the question is, are Nigerian prisons serving their purpose? In Nigeria, there is no difference between prisons, jails and cells. Offenders are to go to prisons and become better people which the society can benefit from. Right now we can say reverse is the case. Inmates don’t feel remorse and most come back worse than they were before going in in the first place. Why is this so? We need to understand this so we can tackle this problem before it gets worse and we all have to sleep with our eyes open all the time

According to the Nigerian prison service, their mandate is as follows:

·       Take into lawful custody all those certified to be so sent by courts of competent jurisdiction;

·       Produce suspects in courts as and when due;

·       Identify the causes of their anti-social disposition;

·       Setting in motion mechanisms for their treatment and training for eventual reintegration into the society as law abiding citizens on discharge;

·       Administer Prisons Farms and Industries for this purpose and in the process generate revenue for the government.

Understanding this mandate, can it be boldly said that the Nigerian prison service go with this obligation?

According to the Nigerian tribune on the 21^st of October 2011, A prison is not expected to be exactly a bed of roses as the inmates are there for penal purposes. But neither is it also supposed to be a bed of thorns and thistles meant to snuff life out of the occupants. However, for the 49,000 inmates in various Nigerian prisons (29,000 of whom are awaiting trial, while 856 are on death row), hell may not be worse. The sanitary situation is not only repulsive but frighteningly demeaning and exposes the inmates to health hazards as inmates are forced to excrete in buckets and stay with their excreta for days. Feeding is a luxury, bathing a rarity, recreation zilch, reformation non-existent and privacy a privilege. Hence, most inmates leave the reformatory frail, fragile and with one debilitating disease or the other.

We can actually say this is contrary to what the prison experience is meant to accomplish in the lives of those who transit through them. According to the Nigerian prisons service mandate I read out earlier, which states the goals and objectives of the Nigerian Prisons Service, and which is to take into lawful custody of those legally detained, identifying causes of their behaviour and retraining them to become useful citizens in the society. Apart from keeping inmates in custody and producing suspects in court when due, the prison officials hardly do any other thing as they are apparently not interested in the rationale behind the actions that got the inmates into prisons or bothered about retraining them.