‘Nigerian prisons are advanced training institutions for crime’

Penultimate week, inmates of the Kirikiri Prison in Lagos rioted resulting in the shooting of some of the inmates by soldiers. How do you see the development?Just like most people have commented on that incident, it is a reflection of the poor state of our prisons. For years now, there have been recurrent calls on […]

Penultimate week, inmates of the Kirikiri Prison in Lagos rioted resulting in the shooting of some of the inmates by soldiers. How do you see the development?
Just like most people have commented on that incident, it is a reflection of the poor state of our prisons. For years now, there have been recurrent calls on immediate efforts to reform the prisons because they are congested and the facilities there can no longer cope with the number of inmates. So what happened there at the Kirikiri Prisons is just one of those problems that need to be solved immediately by all those concerned in criminal justice administration. Unfortunately, it will not go away until we do something about it.
Now the problem has always been that when such incidents happen we pretend as if we are doing something about it. Media-hype it and comments raise to the high heavens. But after a day, two, three and one week everybody goes back to business as usual until another one happens. I want to be sure that we cannot continue to wait or pretend to ourselves that things are normal when they are not. It is a wakeup call for all those involved in criminal justice administration to do something urgent about the welfare of inmates and prison decongestion.
How do you view the situation where inmates that are being reformed in character instead come out more hardened than they were before imprisonment?
There is no doubt that even in the western world, a major concern with the prison is the fact that it is very difficult to achieve the ultimate goal of criminal justice which is the reform of the offender through imprisonment alone. What we have done more in Nigeria is just to gather people and lock them away. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the extent you can achieve anything with that because one day you get to release them under one guise or another; either you have not been able to try them effectively or that they have served their terms and are released to society. So you must be concerned in what happens in that incarceration facility.
Now in Nigeria, it is unfortunate that our prisons have not lived up to their names; not out of the making of any particular institution or agency but out of the collective neglect of all those involved in criminal justice administration. I think we need to be serious about the role of prisons in Nigeria and to take immediate steps to ensure that there is actually some form of reform going on in terms of what happens within the prison environment. Nigerian prisons are at best advanced training institutions for crime and criminality. It is no longer a hidden fact that people go into our prisons for minor offences and by the time they come out they acquire the knowledge and skills to commit more hideous crimes and felonies. This is because of the state of the prisons, they are congested, there are no facilities for processing people in a more effective way and actually engaging in some form of rehabilitation that will be necessary for proper re-integration in the society.
Let’s draw the distinction in this Kirikiri Prison riot: Could it be attributed to the fact that prisons are congested with little welfare programmes or that the inmates are still not ‘reformed’?
It is a combination of these factors; you cannot isolate any of them. These factors and more working together create that sort of situation. That is the reason some of us want us to move beyond this problem identification. I think we have rehearsed the problem so much that everyone should be tired about them. If you go to prison, even the prisoners themselves know about the problems, the ones they caused, the ones caused by the society and the one caused by the authorities. So everybody appears to be comfortable with the problems now. We should be working on the solutions to these problems. What are the immediate solutions to these problems? And ironically, some of these can be solved without the unnecessary workshops, panels and committees that gulp more resources than you need to solve the problem.
The Kirikiri incident, panels will be set where police will investigate, prisons, government will investigate. At the end of the day, you have four or five panel reports but that will be the end. The money you use to pay some of those panel members and others, you can use it to set up one thing that works in the prisons. The problems are surmountable; they can be solved, the resources you need to solve them are less than what you need to sustain this level of inefficiency that we have. And that is the essence of the research we have been doing over the years on the SMA Belgore Model of Criminal Justice Reform. It is a complete model on criminal justice that takes it from pre-crime to post-conviction. And when I say a model, it is not about workshop or theory; it is a practical knowledge and skill that will enable everyone involved in criminal justice contribute to effective prison de-congestion.
A related incident took place in Ekiti with the invasion of the court in Ado-Ekiti. What is your take?
 The invasion of the court in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State is one of the symptoms of the weakness in our justice system and the decadence in our society. Years ago when some of us went into the law profession, the law profession was revered; the courts were very much respected and held in very high esteem. I think we have to be serious because the moment we start experiencing such incidents as happened in Ekiti, then insecurity, violence, lawlessness will be the order of the day. Then we would almost be returning to the ‘state of nature’ that Thomas Hobbes talked about in his thesis on society. It is very important we look at it critically and come up with a solution to prevent such a thing happening anytime in the future.
The Belgore Model appears to focus on non-custodial measures whereas a school of thought believes Nigeria is under incarceration going by the country’s prison population to national population ratio in comparison to other less populated countries with lesser crime rate?
A lot of people mistake the SMA Belgore as an aspect of the criminal justice system. It is the whole criminal justice system.  I have been involved in criminal justice administration for over 20 years. The model involves fast-track trial. In fact, one of the trainings we do is to strengthen criminal investigation and trial process. The SMA Belgore model is also about effective policing with the Belgore Model Police, which strikes a balance between the agitators of ‘state police’ and the agitators for a unitary federal police. Under the SMA Belgore, we have addressed the problem in a way that none of the parties will feel defeated in the argument but make our criminal justice system work. The SMA Belgore model is about streamlining our practice and procedure to ensure that people actually get trials in court. Our courts are no longer courts of trial but courts of adjournments, with all due respect. We need to have effective trial system, so we also train and empower judges in Nigeria under the model. Prosecutors’ prosecutorial capacities are also strengthened under the SMA Belgore model.   
But what we have done beyond the existing processes and procedure is to now introduce these new measures such as case diversion, non-custodial and the overriding basis which is restorative justice. And all these we have explained not as an overriding model for the current practice but as complementary processes. Our encapsulating title for SMA Belgore model is, it is an integration of retributive justice (which is the current practice), restorative justice, and African customary justice systems.