On Monday, September 11, 2017, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Alliance for Good Governance and Democracy called the attention of the Federal Government to an imminent starvation of inmates in Nigeria prisons due to the inability of the Nigerian Prison service to pay contractors supplying food to the prisons for the past two years. The group also called government attention to the non-implementation of the increased feeding allowance for prisoners which was approved in the year 2015 from #200 to #450.

As if that was not enough, another NGO, Prisoners’ Rights Advocacy Initiative in August 2017, decried the poor state of prisons in Lagos, especially Badagry Prison. In a protest letter to the Governor of Lagos, the NGO condemned the existing situation in the prisons – outbreak of infections and communicable diseases, overcrowding, lack of ventilation, lack of mosquito nets, lack of toilet facilities, no space for sports and recreation, unavailability of vehicles to convey inmates to court and an ambulance to convey them to hospitals.

Moving forward, the outcries of these NGOs which received little or no attention from the government was corroborated with the recent death of an inmate at Ogwashi-Uku prison in Delta – Smart Ohuzu.

The condition of the prison is nothing to write home about as all inadequacies stated by Prisoners Right Advocacy exist therein. The prison is overcrowded with a single cell accommodating up to 200 prisoners including inmates suffering from communicable diseases like Tuberculosis among others.

The prisoners eat a meal of poorly cooked beans once a day, have two toilet facilities, pay for electricity bills accumulated by the prisons, pay for health care and ambulance to transport their fellow inmates to the hospitals among other ills.

These among others has shown the poor state of Nigerian Prisons which has inadvertently been a breeding ground for criminals rather than being correction centres as found in the developed world.

Ours is a detention centre where the life of the prisoner is shaped for the worse. The long list of inmates standing trials in different prisons across the country calls for intervention from the necessary departments in the ministry of Justice as they form bulk of inmates in our prisons.

Prison congestion across the country must be addressed, the necessary vocational and educational training must be available for inmates to reform them from their criminal ways. Also, the office of the public defender must be strengthened enough to get justice and freedom for inmates that were unjustly detained across several prisons in the country.

The necessary reforms at Nigerian Prisons can’t come at a better time other than now.