The move to rehabilitate criminals into better citizens, which was one of the motives of rechristening prisons as correctional service centres, seems to have been blighted by failure to properly overhaul the critical service and its personnel.

After four years Nigerian Prisons Service changed its name to the Nigerian Correctional Service as one of the criteria to solve the problem of administration of the criminal justice system, the problem of prison congestion in the country still poses a huge threat to the security of the country.

Nigerian Correctional Service Act repealed and replaced the Prison Act and consequently changed the name from the Nigerian Prisons Service to the Nigerian Correctional Service in 2019, to reflect the need for the reform of the system.

Overcrowding of prisons is a serious challenge and stands as an obstacle to the implementation of the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (also known as Mandela Rules) adopted by the United Nations in 2015.

Meanwhile, part of the reform is to be able to re-integrate freed inmates back to the society.

But during the recent release of some of the inmates by the Chief Judge of Lagos State, Justice Kazeem Alogba, the Controller of Nigeria Correction Service (NCS), Ben Freedman, said about 9,000 inmates are in three Correctional Centres in the state.

Freedman, who was represented by the Deputy Controller, Nigeria Correctional Services (NCS), Lagos Command, Comfort Obiosio, urged the Chief Judge to use his good office to see that privileges were given to some remorseful inmates to decongest the Custodial centres.

He said that they have almost 9,000 locked up in Lagos, adding that the maximum capacity should be about 1,500. He urged the Chief Judge to free those qualified and decongest the facilities.

Speaking with The Guardian on the issue, the Convener of the Centre for Mmadu on Human Rights, Mrs Uju Peace, lamented that most inmates are lumped together, irrespective of offences.

“This is the reason people leave there worse than when they entered. So, they hardly get reformed. Again, the officers are not any better because they are the ones selling drugs and impregnating inmates.”

Peace, therefore, suggested the need for the Nigerian government to protect inmates and not violate their rights to dignity and liberty.

Unfortunately, due to inherent lapses in the system, the correctional centres’ system, which is supposed to be reformatory, has beaten a recourse to its old toga of punishment, thereby making nonsense of the very essence of the new law.

This perverse system of custodial administration implies that the inmates of the nation’s correctional centres regain freedom and are released to society more criminally minded than they were before conviction and remand.

In Nigeria, there are 240 custodial centres spread across the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory, with an inmate population of 77,519 as at June 2023. According to available statistics, the total number of male inmates is 75,724, while the total number of female inmates is 1,795. The total number of convicted inmates is 23,997; convicted male inmates is 23,550, while

convicted female inmates are 447.

The total number of awaiting trial inmates is 53,522. Awaiting trial male is 52,174 while awaiting trial female is 1,348. The convicted inmates are 31 per cent, while awaiting trial inmates are 69 per cent. Male Inmates are 98 per cent and female inmates are two per cent.

From the quoted figures, it is crystal clear the correctional centres are populated with persons awaiting the final determination of their cases in the courts of law.

Also worthy of note is the fact that a significant proportion of awaiting trial inmates have, in fact, spent more years behind bars than they would have spent in the event of their conviction and sentencing.

Aside from prison congestion, other old challenges that remain till date are poor feeding of inmates, lack of adequate medical care due to the absence of requisite facilities, and lack of recreational and vocational training for inmates.

The result is that many inmates of Nigerian prisons come out worse than they were.

The search for true correctional centres also resonated recently, when Dr. Uju Agomoh, the Director of Prisoners’ Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), speaking on a communique issued at the end of a two-day conference on decongestion and corrections administration in Nigeria, said the conference was targeted at the development of effective, efficient and sustainable strategies for managing pretrial detention, congestion of correctional centres and relevant detention related reform initiatives at national and sub-national levels.

The Ministry of Interior, in collaboration with PRAWA and the Nigerian Correctional Service with the support of OSIWA and UNICEF, organised the two-day conference, which was held in Abuja in May and focused on the decongestion of Correctional Centres in Nigeria.

According to her, the conference looked into sustainable strategies for reducing the high number of pre-trial detainees in custodial centres among other strategies to promote the effective implementation of non-custodial measures.

“They looked into how to promote effective reformation, rehabilitation and reintegration of inmates and ex-inmates and a performance review, monitoring and oversight mechanisms and the corrections management and the concurrent role of federal and state governments.”

The conference, therefore, recommended sustainable strategies for reducing the high number of pre-trial detainees in custodial centres, encourage full implementation of Section 12 of the Nigerian Correctional Service Act, 2019; having a strong synergy between the arresting bodies and prosecuting agencies; encouraging the provision of pro bono services and improved access to pre-trial detainees in the custodial centres by agencies statutorily mandated to provide free legal services and CSOs.

They urged governments (both at the state and federal levels) to build additional structures even within existing facilities to accommodate more inmates, and on the part of the legislature, hasten amendment of criminal laws and decriminalisation and declassification of minor and petty offences in Nigerian laws.

They further recommended the need to strengthen the use of virtual courts and urged the government to provide adequate logistics to ease the transportation of inmates to courts as well as ensure training and retraining of the police and other law enforcement agents with the mandate to arrest and detain, courts and correctional service personnel by the government.

Dr. Monday Ubani, in his comment on the matter, said

it should not be enough to change Nigeria Prisons to Correctional Centres.

He said: “It shouldn’t just be about change of name, it is about change of structure, it is about the issue of funding. It is about the philosophy behind correctional centres. If somebody ought to be corrected, then a structure that will facilitate that must be put in place. No matter the number of times you have a name change, no matter what you call it, it cannot translate into anything that changes the life of a particular individual.

“Sadly enough, today, somebody is remanded or convicted as a petty thief, he or she comes out as a hardened armed robber. You go in there, there is no toilet facility. On food, they will tell you a particular number of millions is budgeted, but nobody sees the money being spent on this, and all that.

“It is clearly an issue around systemic failure, and that systemic failure affects everything about the correctional centre, and that is why we are not having any improvement in the system.”

On calls to involve private management correctional centres, he said: “Private participation in service systems, like prison management, may be the way out, but there must be an enabling law. Because in the Constitution, prison is clearly now shared by federal state governments. It used to be on the Exclusive List, but now, it is on the Concurrent List. But we can also privatise it and allow individuals to run the system such as a partnership with the government, whereby the government will handle part of the funding and the private hands take care of the management aspect of it.”

Also, Chief Anthony Dania, a human rights lawyer, expressed the view that correctional facilities make the condition of awaiting trial inmates worse, except when a big man is sent to the facility and he enjoys VIP treatment.

He said: “In fact, the only difference is that such a VIP doesn’t have the freedom to interact socially or openly, but he or she enjoys any other comfort while within the confines of a correctional facility.”

He described the name ‘correctional facility’ as a misnomer since inmates leave detention worse.

He lamented the rot among prison officials that are supposed to reform inmates, saying: “I have handled a case where I defended a suspected murderer. The person was set up to kidnap somebody. And when they succeeded, they discovered that one of the people knew one of the kidnappers very well. So, they shot the person immediately. In the course of my investigation, I found out that the kidnap was arranged by an official in a correctional facility in Warri.”

He also lamented lack of sincerity and commitment by leaders.

“Recently, you heard the immediate past Minister for Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, saying he improved on correctional facilities. There was a day I was at the correctional facility at Auchi in Edo State, I went to see my client. While there, a television station ran a story about how they have reconstructed the correctional facilities across the country, how they have created more conducive centres and Auchi Correctional Facility was mentioned. I asked them right there where the television set provided to the centre was, that the minister was talking about. They all burst into laughter.”

He also blamed judges and magistrates for the congestion of facilities, noting that many suspects facing trial for simple offences are remanded in facilities.

In Abdulrasheed Ibrahim’s estimation, a lot is still needed to make reforms to decongest facilities. He described as disheartening situation awaiting trial inmates spend more years in prison than the period they ought to have served if they had been tried and convicted.