The Prison Rehabilitation Mission International (PREMI) has advised the Federal Government to cut budgetary allocations to correctional centres across the country and productively engage inmates.
Regional Director of PREMI, North and South America, Dr Silas Olayiwola Falokun, made the call at a conference themed: ‘Rehabilitation, reformation, reintegration and resettlement panacea for crime reduction in Nigeria’ organised by the organisation in Lagos on Saturday.
According to Falokun who works at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in the United States, the government’s yearly budgetary allocation and subventions to correctional centres are unnecessary as correctional centres could be self-funding if properly managed.
He said, “The Mandela mandate tells us the minimum standard a prisoner should be treated. They have to work if they can work. A lot of the prisoners are willing to work but have nothing to do. Many of them are losing their health because they have nothing to do.
Prison in Texas is a business. We have people that come in for various reasons. When they come in, they don’t just sit down and wait for the government to budget money to feed them. This is where idiosyncrasy is in Nigeria.
When they go into the prison, the first thing to do is to classify them. Are you hard, medium or soft? This is necessary to know what kind of job they can do. There is the Individualised Treatment Program, ITP which I implement. Under the program, we train prisoners in over 50 crafts which they engage in to generate money for the prison and themselves and even borrow from the State.
How can you keep able-bodied men and women in prison? You keep them in prison, feed them and they wake up in the morning and gang up to plan evil things. They sit all day idling around. An idle hand is a devil’s workshop. These prisoners are crafty. They are intelligent.
The correctional centres in Nigeria need help and this is the reason for the government of today need to yield to our plea to allow PREMI an inlet to correctional facilities in Nigeria.”
Continuing on the consequence of reintegrating inmates into society, he said, “When an inmate regains his freedom, do you know where he is going to settle in? The next person living next to you might offer a prison a house. And if nothing has changed in his life, there is a tendency he is going to burglarise your house.
Here in Nigeria, we don’t talk about the value of houses. We cherish that in America. If you are a sex offender, you can never live close to where we have kids like schools or stuff like that. We don’t have that here. Everybody just commits a crime, goes to prison and reintegrates back into the society. This is part of the problem.
We have the mentality that the prison is a prison and inmates are there for the sake of being kept there. There is the problem of congestion. There are 244 custodian centres in Nigeria, and 82 of them are congested.
We want to bring our correctional centres to a stage where you have to be productive and not be a liability to the government. We want to organise classes for our inmates. We want to partner with the people to make necessary changes in the lives of prisoners. So that prisoners won’t be left to suffer in prison.”
Director General of PREMI, Bishop Kayode Williams stated that punitive measures alone cannot solve the problems of correctional centres, adding that with the growing numbers of inmates in correctional centres across the country, Nigeria has a problem on its hands.
While reeling out the statistics of inmates in prison facilities across the country, he said, “I have been working on this since I returned from prison over forty years ago. I have nothing that I am doing. Although I am a pastor, the prison issue is my lifetime commitment to humanity.
So I feel somebody should challenge that too and the person that would challenge it must be an experienced person. It is not easy to sit in prison for 10 years. It is an experience of life.
A lecturer at the Department of Religion Studies, LASU, Dr Abdul-Razak Uthman who represented the Director of MURIC, Prof. Ishaq Akintola said, “MURIC has been in the struggle for this kind of discussion. We discovered that our prisons in Nigeria are congested. For instance, Aba prison which was established for 113 is now occupied by 600 inmates, Owerri which was built for 550 inmates is now being occupied by 2500 inmates, and Port-Harcourt prison built for 804 now occupied by 4204 inmates.
In Lagos, the prison yards are meant for 3927 and it is being occupied by 7396, Kano 2016 it is being occupied by 4186, in River State, 1354 now occupied by 4424, in Bayelsa State 200 inmates now occupy 444 inmates and Ekiti is built for 400 now occupies by 584.
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