Prison: Lawyer raises concern over power of state controller to reject inmates

A staunch crusader for prison reforms and Executive Director,
Prisoners’ Rights Advocacy Initiative, Mr. Ahmed Adetola-Kazeem,
has raised concern over the power given to the state Controllers of
Prisons in the new prison law to reject additional inmates when the
facility under their watch is filled.

Adetola-Kazeem, a Lagos-based legal practitioner, described the
new law as a watershed in the history of treatment of offenders in
Nigeria, adding that for the bill to fulfill its aims, a lot must
be done.

On his concern about the practicability of Section 12(8), which
empowered the state Controllers of Correctional Service to reject
additional inmates when the facility under his watch is filled, he
said: “The question is where the inmates will be taken to. Will
such an inmate be released, particularly where he has been alleged
to have committed heinous crimes? This particular provision is very
unrealistic unless more prisons are built, considering our
population as a country, and more particularly in urban areas like
Lagos, Kano, and Rivers States among others.”

He believes that except more prisons are built, that provision
of the law would not work because prisons in the country have
already overshot their capacity.

He said the need had arisen to move the prison from the
exclusive legislative list to the concurrent legislative list, so
that both the Federal Government and the states can share the
burden of funding the prison.

He said until this was done and more prisons built, the law
might be a mere academic exercise.

“The Correctional Services Act cannot work effectively unless
some attention is paid to other aspects of our national lives. The
non-custodian measures such as community service, probation, and
parole among others may not work effectively if we do not have
reliable data of every person in Nigeria. If you don’t have
reliable information of people, you can’t effectively trace them
when they abscond. Furthermore, technologies like trackers need to
be adopted to effectively track those on parole, for instance, to
prevent them from escaping justice.

“There is need for infrastructural upgrade and training and
retraining of correctional officers for the new act to have any
effect. In order for the act to fulfill its aim of reforming,
rehabilitating and reintegrating offenders, there needs to be fewer
people in our overcrowded prisons and adequate and state-of-the-art
training facility.

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