Enugu — A human rights organisation, Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA) has raised alarm over what it described as the increasing tendency of corrupt judicial and police officers to send innocent people to jail under the guise that they were lunatics.

The group said the practice was widespread in the country and has not only contributed to the perennial problem of over congestion in the nation's prisons but has led to the unwarranted socio-economic dislocation of victims and their families.

Executive Director of the group, Dr Uju Agomoh who stated this in Enugu at a consultative workshop on the processing of mentally challenged prisoners within the criminal justice system, also pointed out that genuine civil lunatics are neglected and often abused in the prisons with little or no efforts made to treat or rehabilitate them.

She said that rather than refer suspected mentally challenged people to psychiatric hospitals, some police officers in collaboration with police officers would send them to the prisons as civil lunatics in a bid to circumvent the normal process of trial of accused persons adding that many innocent people have been victimized through that illegal process.

Dr Aguomoh said the group had also discovered that in some cases persons who should actually be classified as civil lunatics are deliberately classified as 'criminal lunatics' thus "blurring the distinction and making it more difficult to ascertain the actual figures of the innocent person in prison who are there for merely being mentally-ill".