Newspaper reports have it that on Wednesday, June 3, there was a jail break at the Enugu Prison in which 150 inmates escaped. Days earlier, a news report and editorial in Business Day had warned of the heightened possibility of jail breaks in the country’s prisons on account of the smuggling of mobile phones into many of our 227 prisons.
The purpose of this editorial though, goes beyond the smuggling of mobile phones, which is just one of the many problems plaguing our prison system.
Over the years, there have been a string of jail breaks in our prisons, but each time, the authorities count their losses, lick their wounds, they thereafter carry on as if nothing happened. This lends credence to the notion that the greatest lesson of history is that mankind does not learn from it. In civilised and enlightened societies, this should not be so.
This recent jail break underscores the poor physical and administrative state of our prisons and of our criminal justice system, and the need for reform in these areas.The cost of aloofness or indolence is too high. The Enugu jail break was reportedly attended by the rape of female inmates and prison officials, damage to prison facilities and injuries sustained by prison inmates who were attacked by fleeing inmates. It is reported that some of the escaped inmates who were caught, were shot in both legs to prevent them from re-attempting to escape and in the process, one of the re-arrested inmates lost his life.
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Civil society groups like the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and the Human Rights Law Service (HRLS) have rightly observed that prisons are usually meant to confine convicts and sometimes, suspects who are being prosecuted for serious offences. But in our 227 prisons which hold about 50,000 inmates, roughly half of the inmates’s population are awaiting trial for offences which carry penalties of between four and eight years imprisonment. Findings are that there are many inmates who have been arrested and detained without trial for upwards of ten years and other such anomalies. And many a time, awaiting trial inmates find themselves staying in prison for longer than the terms they would have had to serve if they had been convicted.
This holding charge phenomenon is responsible for a gross over-population of the prisons and great physical and psychological pain to inmates, including those who would later be found innocent. It is remarkable that majority of the country’s prisons were constructed before independence (49 years ago) and have not been modified or renovated since then and they accommodate several more inmates than they were designed for. At the time they were built, the population explosion and the attendant upsurge in antisocial conduct were not anticipated. The facilities are cramped, infrastructure over-stretched, there is hunger, disease, and several other inhuman pains and deprivations in the prisons.
Government cannot continue to ignore the need for prison and justice systems’ reforms. For as long as the need for these reforms are ignored, we may continue to witness incidents like the recent Enugu jail break and the likes.It must also be recalled that government owes its citizens a duty of decent treatment even if they find themselves in prison.
