NASARAWA’S CORRECTIONAL CENTRE OF DEATH
Nigeria’s searing inequality levels means that not even convicts, those indicted, docked and
incarcerated by the law acting through the courts, can claim equality before the law, as princes exist even among prisoners.
Separate news reports relating to prisoners have collided in recent time with chilling incongruity. First, came the revelation that Nigerian crossdresser, Idris Okuneye (Bobrisky) sentenced to six months for Naira abuse spent his jail term in a cozy apartment instead of a proper prison.
Another report concerning inmates in Nasarawa State is far more disturbing. According to the report, 12 inmates of the Nigeria Correctional Services (NCS) Medium Security Custodial Centre in Keffi, Nasarawa State, died of a strange illness allegedly caused by malnutrition. The deceased were said to have been hurriedly buried without the knowledge or consent of their family members.
The cracks in Nigeria’s legal and justice systems continue to prove fatal for many who live and die without any dignity.
Nigerian prisons are ordinarily places of squalor where overcrowding, desperately poor hygiene and what can be summarily termed the failure of humanity all combine to make incarceration a living hell for any length of time.
Many of those who have had cause to do time in Nigerian prisons never remain the same afterward,that is if they even return. There have been personal stories of how people who were just average criminals dealing in petty crime went to prison where they became hardened criminals.
The fact is that the Nigerian correctional service as it is set up is a blinding slap on the face of justice in Nigeria. The absolutely shocking conditions under which Nigeria keeps those it wants to correct, many of them only awaiting trial, is an absolute disgrace. No country which has any development aspiration should keep even those it considers the worst offenders under such conditions. It speaks to a deep lack of dignity in such a society.
The reason no serious country kills Its worst offenders is that it believes in the fact that they can be rehabilitated and released back into the society to contribute their lot to the growth of such a society. No country is served when such rehabilitation runs into the brick wall of squalid prison conditions.
Prisons have been attacked in Nigeria because of poor security. Prison walls have also been known to collapse under pressure from nature, leading to the escape of prisoners.
The measure of the civilization of any society is how it treats those on the margins. Prisoners very much belong to a group that is on the margins. If any country takes away the freedom of anyone within its borders citing a breach of the laws which solidify its social contract, the least such a country can do is to ensure that they are detained like human beings.
What rings true is that in Nigeria those who are deemed the worst offenders are treated better while petty criminals are fed to the fires of an unjust and uncoordinated system.
If Nigeria was a just society, many of those who subject inmates to a slow death would themselves be prisoners.
While so-called repentant terrorists are feted by the state in the name of deradicalization and rehabilitation, awaiting trial inmates are dying under inhuman conditions.
Nigeria needs to rethink its penal system. The aim should always be to bruise and correct, never to break.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
