24 September 2007
editorial
Lagos — On September 6 this year, the nation witnessed yet another riot in the Kano prisons which culminated in a jail break.
In their bid to quell the incident, security officials killed a number of the prisoners, some of who were awaiting trial. Barely days after, a similar riot broke out in the famous Agodi prisons in Ibadan. It resulted in another jail break. In trying to contain the unruly prisoners, security officials shot dead about a dozen of them.
A nation that is fast getting used to reports of jail breaks and the consequent killings associated with them, took both incidents with the sort of quiet that would surprise any one with a proper understanding of what jail breaks symbolize or say about a country's criminal justice system. As in the Kano prison riots, the Agodi incident has been blamed on the sordid state of the correctional facility. The inmates were said to have complained of poor treatment in which they claimed that one of them had taken ill and died as a result of negligence by the prison officials. In the Kano incident, the prison officials themselves admitted that the prisons were severely overcrowded with a population triple the prison capacity.
Ordinarily, two jail breaks in quick succession ought to trigger a national alarm on the state of not only the country's penitentiaries but also the entire criminal justice system. Repeatedly, we have bemoaned and denounced the decadent condition of the nation's prisons and the inhuman treatment of their inmates. We have done that in the belief that addressing the situation is central to overcoming the incidence of jail riots and breaks. Some people have, of course, disagreed with this view. They argue that jail breaks do not flow directly from the sordid condition of the prisons. They instead blame the syndrome on the bad manners and desperation of some prisoners. This, evidence has shown, is, however, only partly correct. While it may be true that some jail breaks are opportunistic in nature, resulting from security lapses in the prisons; most of them are a direct response to the unbearable conditions in the prisons. At the core of the problem is the nation's criminal justice system which is in dire need of serious reform. From the arrest and trial of suspects to their detention, we see an urgent need for a complete overhaul of the existing practice. The stone-age system currently in operation in which people, including minors, are casually thrown into prison even for minor offenses, can only breed more criminals or harden them.
The high frequency of jail breaks must now prompt the government into taking another look at the nation's criminal justice system with a view to bringing it in line with civilized practices elsewhere. If truth be told, the current state of the prisons can hardly achieve the purpose for which most criminals are committed to confinement. The primary aim of incarceration, after all, is not to dehumanize inmates. Rather, it is to help them reform themselves into acceptable members of the society. That explains why in many countries prisons are referred to as correctional facilities. They are not to be converted unwittingly to torture or death chambers. Putting 1000 prisoners in a prison meant for 300 is inhuman and can only trigger the sort of riots the nation has witnessed lately in the prisons.
In their bid to decongest the prisons and the courts, some countries have come up with practical ways of dealing with minor and first offenders. Some countries for instance, which are also facing similar problem of prison congestion, have given more discretionary powers to prison controllers to release minors as a way of decongesting the prisons. We need such imaginative ideas in the nation's prison reform package.
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