Her sister, Justice Olufunmilayo Olajumoke Atilade of the same Lagos Judiciary could not have wished for a better sibling. They are both at the top in the Lagos Judiciary, occupying the first and second position respectively.
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As part of the activities marking the 2012 – 2013 Legal year, the Lagos Chief Judge on September 18, 2012, released 233 inmates, some of who were awaiting trial at the Kirikiri prisons in Lagos.
This is in keeping with her promise that during her tenure as the Chief Judge, she will decongest the prisons in Lagos. The Kirikiri prisons comprises of the maximum security section, the medium security prison and the women prison. We congratulate those who were released by the Chief Judge. To those who were lucky to be remembered, their release is not an affirmation that their hands are clean but a simple manifestation of the belief that justice is at the root of society. Justice Philip was morally correct in observing that “it is better for ten guilty persons to be set free than for an innocent person to be incarcerated”.
Some have actually said that it is better for ninety nine guilty persons to be set free than for one innocent man to be punished. This is the right way to go. It is an understatement that Nigerian prison system is the opposite of what prisons should be. They have become a “conveyor belt of injustice, from beginning to the end”. Prisons are programmed to make bad people become good persons.
In normal countries, the prison system is reformatory and prepares inmates for a better life during and after incarceration. It is a place where those who have wronged society undergo some penitence drill, be punished and re-organized so that they can be better persons and be of good use to the society when they are released. No responsible prison facility or system is designed to make an inmate crueler or worse than he was before incarceration. Instead of being a reformatory institution, the Nigerian prisons have become a replica of what the Biblical hell will look like, a breeding ground for hardened criminals.
According to Amnesty International’s Africa Focus Bulletin that released a report on Nigerian prisons in 2008, “Nigeria’s prisons are filled with people whose human rights are systematically violated. Approximately 65 percent of the inmates are awaiting trial, most of who have been waiting for their trial for years. Most of the people in Nigeria’s prisons are too poor to be able to pay lawyers, and only one in seven of those awaiting trial have private legal representation”.
With just 91 legal aid lawyers working in Nigeria, how on earth can these helpless suspects obtain justice? We believe this report to be true as setting a standard for prison reforms in Nigeria. Ironically, some of those who were released, indeed as has been the case in the past, have been in the prison much longer than the maximum period of jail time stipulated by the law creating the offences for which they were held. To such persons, how would the society explain the agony and waste that the slow and poor judicial system has inflicted upon them? Some leave the prison walls and return home disillusioned, hopeless, empty and disoriented.
All they have got in life is overdraft and gratitude that they did not die in prison even when they have not been found guilty of any offence. Such characters are bitter for the rest of their lives and can hardly be of any good to society. In the end we have a recycling of criminally infected minds, body and soul. It is for this reason that the actions of the Lagos Chief Judge deserve commendation.
The state cannot be the one breaching its own laws and at the same time expect citizens not to complain. We strongly urge other states to encourage prison reforms and make the review of cases of incarcerated persons a priority especially if the courts are not expeditiously dispensing cases. Those who ought not to be in prisons have no business being there for even a second and we believe the society is equipped to accommodate this problem. Sadly at the root of this problem is the inefficiency of the judicial system which allows criminal cases to remain pending in court for ages.
The courts and those who have stakes therein need to help society to ensure that accused persons do not rot in prisons even when they have not been convicted. Lawyers must assist the courts as officers in the temple of justice to ensure that cases are speedily disposed of and as much as possible. Judges and magistrates alike should take criminal cases more seriously and give them better attention so that persons are not unduly kept in prisons at the expense of the taxpayers’ money.
Ministry of Interior that supervises the prisons has a duty to provide facilities to take care of prisoners. “Black Maria” and other transport facilities should be available to take suspects to courts while police officers should ensure due attendance when they are prosecution witnesses. Regular and watery reasons for adjournments by counsel or the court should not stand. Most prisons in Nigeria were built by the colonial matters during the period of dominion.
The facilities have been since overstretched and exhausted to the point that they no longer offer any safety to the inmates. There is high over-crowding of prisons and facilities made to accommodate a hundred persons for instance, have over a thousand of them, all sharing poor and decayed structures. This has the natural effect of damaging their physical and mental health in the short and long term.
This is why jailbreaks come in handy as the inmates easily overpower the warders and tear through weak iron or block forms. Feeding system in the prisons is a national embarrassment. There is neither any regard for quality of meals or relevant quantity to make anybody healthy. That is why inmates look malnourished and pale in the prison facilities. Even the prison warders are themselves poorly paid.
They resort to serving rich inmates especially those who can afford foods cooked from home. This creates a class system in the prisons with some inmates living luxuriously in incarceration. In such a situation, the poor people stand the least chance of getting justice under our prison system and the time to save the prisons is now. It is for this reason that we agree with the conclusions of Van Kregten in the Amnesty International report cited above that, “The conditions we saw and the stories we heard from inmates are a national scandal.”
The Nigerian government is simply sleeping on duty in terms of respecting and implementing international and local obligations in criminal justice administration. While we battle with more pressing problems to fix the nation and generate happiness for those not incarcerated, we should care for those who were once free because nobody was born a prisoner.
-Emma Okah: [emmaokah@yahoo.com, 08033211999]
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