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Declining Prison Facilities As Impediment To The Rehabilitation Of Offenders
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In the light of the above, the study
seeks to explore what facilities are available in prison and why, how
they are accessed or used, how staff respond to and facilitate
rehabilitation of offenders (or inmates), and how inmates conduct their
work within the facilities. This will involve a critique of inmates’
assessment of facilities in the prison, followed by an assessment of the
inmates’ view of the prison social setting and general practices. The
inmates’ view of the prison’s official attitude towards them and its
implications for the rehabilitation ideals will be examined.
An
approach drawing from both quantitative and qualitative methodologies is
adopted. The quantitative component – a survey of prisoners – will
enables an exploration of prisoners’ use (and non-use) of rehabilitative
facilities in prison. The qualitative component – both inmates and
prison guards will be interviewed to generate data on how rehabilitation
scheme is perceived, experiences of inmates, and how the scheme
operates in prisons. Ikoyi prison has a population of 1,835 inmates and
it is believed that recidivists will constitute a substantial portion.
Data will be obtained from the interned offenders in Ikoyi prison, Lagos
State, South West of Nigeria.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The
Nigerian prison facilities are undeniably in a deplorable condition.
The Prison Act may have been unable to define the purposes of
imprisonment, silent on the crucial service of rehabilitation, and
archaic in its concept of revenue generation. The resultant structure is
inadequate.
The prisons in Nigeria are currently operating freely,
and individual prison facilities lack a management information system
that monitors cost effectiveness in prison industries (Omoni and Ijeh,
2009). There is no activity based cost accounting system for prison
industries in Nigeria. This has resulted in a lack of financial
transparency and precludes any possibility of a cost benefit or a cost
effectiveness analysis of any given performance by the industry.
Although most of the prisons have facilities that enable inmates engage
in vocational training, the working tools are lacking and where there
are existing trade and skills acquisition centres within the prison
yards, they are either not functioning or unsuitable for some of the
inmates who may prefer other trades and educational learning processes
that are not existing in the prisons rehabilitation curriculum. In some
prisons where they train the detainees on tailoring, there is only one
sewing machine to a population of about 300 detainees. Besides not
having tools, there are no instructors and workshops for training of the
detainees (PrisonWatch, 2000). For example, there are no rehabilitative
facilities in existence in Ijebu-Ode prison, except a cane-making
workshop and the equipment in the workshop was provided by the Catholic
Church through its Justice and Peace Department. The tailoring and
wood-carving shops available are not functional (Aminu, 1997: 11). The
same thing applies to facilities such as carpentry, knitting, welding
and a host of others. Lack of adequate funding appears to be the main
reason constraining the Nigeria prison from delivering on its mandate.
Consequently, inmates are economically unproductive, physically idle and
emotional disturbed (Dambazua, 2007 and Oshodi, 2010).
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]The study was designed to establish whether declining prison facilities interfered with the rehabilitation of offenders in Ikoyi prison, Lagos State, Nigeria. An approach drawing from both quantitative and qualitative methodologies was adopted. A cross-sectional survey and in-depth interview of prisoners enabled the exploration of specific objectives formulated around the purpose of the study, which included the need to know how ‘needs assessment and classification of offenders correlated ... Continue reading---
