“In the law, being sent to prison is
nothing to do with putting you in a terrible prison to make you suffer.
The punishment is that you lose your freedom. If we treat people like
animals when they are in prison, they are likely to behave like animals.
Here, we pay attention to you as human beings.” — Arne Nilsen, Governor
of Bastoy Prison, Norway
After
reading Erwin James’ beautiful and didactic piece on Bastoy Prison in
The Guardian newspaper of the UK on February 25, 2013, I was sunk in
reverie. I thought of a scenario where it is possible for a convict to
choose where to serve his or her jail term.
Imagine a suspect
saying: “My Lord, I plead guilty to all the crimes for which I have been
charged by the prosecutor. My allocution is however that in sentencing
me, temper justice with mercy by sending me to Bastoy Prison in Norway.”
Norway
has a population of slightly less than five million compared to
Nigeria’s approximately 170 million. It has fewer than 4,000 prisoners
while Nigerian prisons housed 54,156 inmates as of October 31, 2012. Of
this number, only 15, 804 were convicted persons while 38, 352 were
awaiting trial persons. In terms of prison and prisoners’ management,
the Nigerian Prison Service has a lot to learn from their Norwegian
counterpart.
According
to the reporter, in Norway, the loss of liberty is all the punishment
prisoners suffer. Cells have televisions, computers, integral showers
and sanitation. Some prisoners are segregated for various reasons, but
as the majority served their term – anything up to the 21-year maximum
sentence (Norway has no death penalty or life sentence) – they were
offered education, training and skill-building programmes. One of the
prisoners interviewed by the reporter was quoted as saying, “It’s like
living in a village, a community. Everybody has to work. But we have
free time so we can do some fishing, or in summer we can swim off the
beach. We know we are prisoners but here we feel like people.”
In
Bastoy, there are 70 members of staff on the 2.6 sq km island during
the day, 35 of whom are uniformed guards. Their main job is to count the
prisoners – first thing in the morning, twice during the day at their
workplace, once en masse at a specific assembly point at 5pm, and
finally at 11pm, when they are confined to their respective houses. Only
four guards remain on the island after 4pm. Bastoy prisoners live in
houses that accommodate up to six people. Every man has his own room and
they share kitchen and other facilities. Only one meal a day is
provided in the dining hall. The men earn the equivalent of £6 a day and
are given a food allowance each month of around £70 with which to buy
provisions for their self-prepared breakfasts and evening meals from the
island’s well-stocked mini-supermarket.
Prisoners in
Norway can apply for a transfer to Bastoy when they have up to five
years left of their sentence to serve. Every type of offender, including
men convicted of murder or rape, may be accepted, so long as they fit
the criteria, the main one being a determination to live a crime-free
life on release.Bastoy prisoners work on farmland where they tend sheep,
cows and chickens, or grow fruit and vegetables. Other jobs are
available in the laundry; in the stables looking after the horses that
pull the island’s cart transport; in the bicycle repair shop, (many of
the prisoners have their own bikes, bought with their own money); on
ground maintenance or in the timber workshop.
The working day
begins at 8.30am. There are phone boxes from where prisoners can call
family and friends. Weekly visits are permitted in private family rooms
where conjugal relations are allowed. So you can have sex and make
babies while in prison! There are three golden rules on Bastoy: no
violence, no alcohol and no drugs. It takes three years to train to be a
prison guard in Norway. For these humane treatments of its prisoners
the reoffending rate for those released from Bastoy is just 16 per cent
which is the lowest in Europe.
Now let’s do a quick comparison
with what obtains in any Nigerian prison. Our prisons have a total
carrying capacity of 47,284 but as of October 31, 2012 was accommodating
54, 156. That is 6,872 more than the carrying capacity. However, as
earlier pointed out, majority of inmates in Nigerian prisons are
Awaiting Trial Persons. This is an indictment on our criminal justice
system.
Many
a time, these ATPs spend more time than they should have served if
found guilty of the offences for which they are charged while others are
found to be innocent after several years of incarceration. Indeed,
justice delayed is justice denied. The police, prison authorities and
the judiciary are reprehensible for this untoward situation.
Judges
adjourned cases too frequently, police do not finalise their
investigations on time while the prison authority complained of being
poorly trained and lacking in modern equipment including not having
vehicles to convey ATPs to court for their trials.
The Federal
Government through the Ministry of Interior needs to fund our prisons
better. As the example from Bastoy Prison shows, prisoners have rights
and privileges which they ought to enjoy in order to be properly
reformed. This includes the right to vote at elections provided you are
not on death row. The animalistic ways prisoners are treated in Nigeria
make the whole concept of prison system warped and disorientated. The
poor feeding, sanitary and living conditions in Nigerian prisons are
what make the country to experience recurring cases of jailbreaks.
Pray,
who will want to escape from Bastoy prison with the ‘royal’ treatment
being meted out to inmates there? As the National Assembly works to
amend the obviously anachronistic Prison Act 1963 and Immigration Act
1963, it is imperative to take a holistic look at how to reform the
country’s prison system. It is a matter of urgent national importance to
decongest Nigerian prisons by looking at other forms of punishments
like suspended sentence, weekend sentence, community service, options of
fine, prerogative of mercy, etc.
I could not agree more with the
submissions of Erwin James and Arne Nilsen in the report on Bastoy
prison. Erwin summarises his experience thus: “Bastoy is no holiday
camp. In some ways, I feel as if I’ve seen a vision of the future – a
penal institution designed to heal rather than harm and to generate hope
instead of despair. I believe all societies will always need
high-security prisons. But there needs to be a robust filtering
procedure along the lines of the Norwegian model, in order that the
process is not more damaging than necessary. I do hope that the Nigerian
government and relevant agencies will draw the needful lessons from
Norway.
No comments:
Post a Comment