President Muhammadu Buhari recently took a bold step towards reforming Nigeria’s prisons with the signing into law of the Nigeria Correctional Services Act 2019, which repealed the Prisons Act 2018. By that action, the Nigeria Prison Service became the Nigeria Correctional Service. The implication of the new law is that the greater focus of Nigeria’s prison system will no longer be to punish offenders, but to correct and reform them into better citizens who will not pose a risk to the country and its citizens.
The signing of the Nigeria Correctional Service Act into law is good news for Nigeria’s prisons system and the society. The objectives of the Correctional Service are to correct; reform; rehabilitate; reintegrate; provide safe, secure and humane custody for inmates; identify existence and causes of anti-social behaviour of inmates; initiate behaviour modification through provision of medical, psychological, spiritual and counseling services for all offenders and provide speedy support to facilitate speedy disposal of cases.
The new law also provides for the empowerment of inmates through the deployment of educational and vocational skills training programmes. It is also expected to facilitate income generation through custodial centres, farms and industries. It also forbids torture, as well as inhumane and abusive treatment of inmates.
Thankfully, it has come at a time when there is a new reform-minded helmsman at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, who is well known for the missionary zeal with which he pursues his public objectives. If he brings the passion and commitment with which he goes about his public assignments to the Internal Affairs Ministry, Nigerians can rest assured of better times for our correctional facilities and their inmates.
The long and tortuous journey to this new law began eleven years ago when a former senator, Victor Ndoma-Egba, presented the Correctional Services Bill on the floor of the Senate, with the hope that it would address the flaws of the Nigerian Prisons Act and provide for true moral transformation of inmates, through better funding and greater commitment to the task of reforming them.
Now is the time to bring the objectives of the law into reality. With the former Osun State Governor at the helm of affairs, there are great expectations that the Correctional Services will be truly transformed.
Under the previous laws guiding the prisons system, the institutions have been overcrowded and poorly funded with scant attention paid to reforming the prisoners. The prisons were, instead, rather, conducive to the hardening of their hearts and characters, as persons held for minor offences such as unruly conduct and petty stealing were kept with hardened criminals like armed robbers and kidnappers.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the prisoners came out of the prisons more hardened after interacting with and undergoing tutelage of hardened criminals. The overcrowding, poor feeding and other terrible conditions in which prisoners live in the country is legendary.
Sadly, most the nation’s 73, 995 prison inmates have not been convicted of any crime. They are largely responsible for the overcrowding in the cells. For example, only 23, 568, which is just 32 percent of the prisoners have been convicted of any crime while the remaining 50, 427 (58 percent) are Awaiting Trial. All talks of providing for half-houses and other non-custodial sanctions have so far failed to crystallize into the reduction of the total prison population to match the facilities available for holding them.
But mercifully, the new Nigeria correctional service law has many provisions that should help to reduce the prison population. For example, Sections 12, 4-12 of the Act provides that “in the event that the custodial centre (that is the prison) has exceeded its capacity, the state controller shall within a period not exceeding one week, notify the Chief Judge of the state, the Attorney-General, the Prerogative of Mercy Committee, the state criminal justice committee and other relevant bodies.
The section of the law also empowers correctional centre superintendents to reject more intakes when the facilities are filled to capacity. This provision, alone, will help to ensure that prisoners are not packed like sardines with more and even more inmates being brought in everyday.
Besides, the law provides for the giving of non-custodial sentences for petty offenders. It will help to quicken the implementation of the non-custodial provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) through the provision of manpower support for supervision of non-custodial sentences (which can be done through sending convicts for community services) parole system and probation, under which convicts are sent out on probation, during which they must be of good behavior, barring which they will be punished for their former and subsequent offences.
The law also provides for the establishment of a mental health review board to consider and review cases of inmates with mental disorders, holding of self development and vocational worskshops and the building of young offenders facilities in every state to stop the keeping of underage persons in adult prisons.
Now that this Act has become law, the new minister and his team must put good machinery in place to ensure its implementation to the letter. Certainly, the prisons system law will require better funding. This is the time to incorporate the financial implications of the new law into the budget while the legislative and other relevant bodies should ensure the approval and speedy release of the funds to ensure that the law is implemented.
Ideally, it will be necessary to empower a visitation body to all prisons to assess the true state of affairs and the immediate interventions that can be made to give life to the provisions of the law. If the prisons can be adequately transformed and the population significantly reduced to leave only the most hardened and major offenders in custody, the institutions can be better managed to ensure that they become truly correctional facilities so that the inmates come out as reformed and truly repentant citizens who are ready to contribute their quota to the development of the society.
In the final analysis, the country will be better for it by way of reduced criminality and insecurity. Let Aregbesola bring the zeal with which he pursued the Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme (OYES) and his vast improvement in school infrastructure in the state to bear on the construction and upgrade of these correctional facilities and the reformation of the inmates to have a truly correctional service.
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