The establishment of Correctional Services has been removed from the exclusive legislative list to the concurrent list. This was done to allow state governors establish correctional facilities, manage inmates, and ultimately reduce the burden on the federal government. In this interview with TINA ABEKU, a security expert and retired officer of the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), Francis Enobore, speaks on the challenges facing custodial management and how to safeguard Correctional Centres against attacks, breaches, and jailbreaks.
What can you say about recent cases of inmates escaping lawful custody and the view that the authorities are failing in their responsibility?
It is quite unfortunate that we are having pockets of these issues. I need to point out that in correctional management, there’s always a difference between jail attacks and jailbreaks. Jailbreak connotes a kind of insurrection among the inmates that can be traced to mismanagement by handlers, which causes chaos or riots that snowball into the inmates breaking out of custody.
On the other hand, a jail attack means a heavily armed group(s) coming from outside to attack a custodial facility, breaking into it, and releasing their fellow criminals. So, to put it in the proper perspective, what the Nigerian Correctional Service has seen over the years has always been more of jail attacks and not prisoners breaking out due to insurrection. Whichever way you look at it, whether jail attack or jailbreak, none portends good for the socioeconomic health of the society because when you keep felons in custody, the expectation of members of the public is that they should be kept there until they show enough remorse either through training or passing through the mill of justice, and when they are genuinely expected to go out of custody, they are released.
But when a jailbreak or attack happens, it is always a sad experience for every correction officer. If we go down memory lane for a couple of years, talking about 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, we had a couple of attacks by armed men invading custodial facilities and releasing inmates. Year 2023 was relatively smooth for the service compared to the experience of those years of external attacks, which served as a lesson for the corrections management and other sister security organisations to retool different strategies to protect custodial facilities.
How can we forestall these jail attacks and breaks?
For the problem of jail attacks and jailbreaks to be solved, detailed analysis of the issues need to be carried out to avoid doing things that only yield negative results. In managing custodial facilities, there are basic things that you need to put in place. Recall that anybody that is kept in custody will always want to get freedom; it is natural with human beings to want to be free at all cost. There is no jurisdiction in the whole world where prisoners feel comfortable and don’t want to break out. The Correctional Service has over the years been talking about the establishment of buffer zones around all their custodial facilities. If we had buffer zones, we would have been able to solve the problem of external attacks, and that of inmates escaping due to structural failure like the one that happened in Suleja.
Creating a buffer zone means to give a 150 metres gap from the perimeter fence of every custodial facility, ensuring it is free from any development. This means there will be no houses or any other development 150 metres from the correctional centres. In fact, the Section 9(3) of the Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 provides that custodial facilities should maintain not less than 100 metres radius around such a facility.
The first line of defence is the perimeter fence. From the first perimeter fence to the inner perimeter fence is where you have this buffer zone of not less than 100 metres as provided by the Act. While the first perimeter fence serves to delay attackers, those that are on observation towers in the inner perimeter fence are watching and as the attackers are violating the outer perimeter fence, they are engaging them and calling for backup.
So, before the attackers finish violating that external perimeter fence and break through the inner fence to access the prison yard, backups would have arrived to repel them and the situation will be better managed. But most of our custodial facilities border private buildings. The Suleja facility is very close to us and we see the situation there. Most of the facilities we have across the country are either bordering the roads or private facilities. So, officers on guard duty don’t have that privilege of profiling whoever is approaching their facility to know who he is. If he were to detonate an explosive for example, he would have been standing right by the side of the wall of the custodial facility, yet we will not know who that person is because it is a free road. Some facilities are bordered by shops and markets owned by private individuals. This situation has always been a source of concern to some of us and this is why we have always cried out that these facilities should be relocated to areas where basic security features can be maintained.
Whose fault is it that the buffer zones are non-existent?
Most of these facilities that are now choked up by urbanisation were at inception far flung from cities. It was over the years that gradually private individuals started encroaching into the buffer zone lands provided by the government, such that individuals have literally taken over the buffer zones. Wherever a new facility is to be built now, the law as enshrined in the present NCoS Act 2019 has to be followed, which provides that nobody should cross 100 metres to a custodial facility because it is reserved as a buffer zone. It enables the service to take action on whoever contravenes that law.
For the existing custodial centres, nothing can be done about their buffer zones. However, because most of the prisons are in their jurisdiction, state governments can relocate them or pay compensation to individuals that have private property within the demarcated radius to relocate, so that the centres can establish buffer zones.
There is also this argument about the age of these facilities. What do you think about this?
Truly, some of the facilities were constructed by the colonial masters. They can no longer resist the kind of sophistication we now have in crime and criminality. So, these things need to be put in proper context. Sometimes, when you talk about the need for recruitment of additional personnel, you hear people suggesting that the Correctional Service should go to the police, immigration or civil defence to borrow personnel to help out. I consider it quite unfortunate because if the NCoS has enough personnel, it doesn’t need to go begging for personnel from other sister security services. This is because almost everyone has their hands full. The police you are asking to give personnel to the Correctional Service don’t have enough to protect Nigerians and their own facilities and it is the same with other services. The proper thing is that the government should give approval for recruitment of personnel so that you have people to effectively man the custodial facilities and rescue dire situations.
How can the state governments be encouraged to leverage on the new law and build modern custodial facilities?
We have been talking about the state governors and the need for them to step in. They play very strategic roles in these issues. State governors own more than 90 per cent of inmates in custody. The inmates committed state offences and are supposed to be tried by states’ judiciary. If you look at the history of past jail attacks, you will also discover that over 90 or even 95 per cent of inmates that escape were Awaiting Trial Inmates (ATI).
In most cases, the assailants attack our facilities, break in and remove all those that were awaiting trial leaving the cells of the convicted inmates intact. We saw that in Abolongo. When it happened in Kabba that was what we saw and it’s the same for other locations. Even when they attacked Owerri, they did the same because the psychology of inmates is like this; once they are convicted even if it’s for 29 years, every day, they tick off a day. But for an awaiting trial person that knows that the Nigerian judicial system is such that you can be there for the next 10 years and your trial is still pending, being in prison is pure mental torture. Therefore, they are very difficult to control and maintain.
So, when correctional officers are crying that state governors should try the inmates that they kept in custody, the reason is to make them amenable for correction. We are not saying come and open the door and remove them. Those that have cases to answer and need rehabilitation, identify and give them to us so that we spread them across the centres where they can be rehabilitated. It is not all our facilities in the country that are overcrowded. If you go to Hadejia, Gusau, and many others, you’ll discover that some of them are not even up to half the installed capacity. Go to the farm centres where we really have the training programmes going on and you will see that no farm centre has up to 20 per cent of the installed facility. These are large farm centres where inmates are to be trained. Those that are privileged enough to be sent to the farm centres after being convicted are doing well but we can only send inmates that have been convicted and not awaiting trial. I have not heard of any inmate that went through such training that went back to crime because when they serve their term and are leaving, the agency gives them starter packs like knapsack sprayer, seeds and other such tools to earn a living in the larger society. But where you have a majority of the inmates awaiting trial, it is very difficult to give them such an opportunity.
Since the states have the largest number of inmates in custody, will they take care of their feeding as advocated by the previous administration?
Former President, Muhammadu Buhari, signed the Correctional Alteration Act number 15 that has now removed the NCoS from the exclusive legislative list to the concurrent list. By this act, the state governors are now allowed to establish their correctional facilities and manage their inmates. The abuse of custodial punishment by states’ governors led to that amendment. We have a situation where they just gather street traders or two people fighting are just arrested, taken to prison and forgotten without trial, feeding, without paying for their medications or any form of upkeep or security. It was in the wisdom of the former President to take the decision that the states should establish their own correctional facilities and take care of their inmates.
From this, one would have expected that going forward, the states’ governments by now should be making arrangements on how to build and manage their own inmates, but I doubt if any state governor has made a serious move apart from one or two of them. I think this is because of a lack of understanding of the management of correctional facilities.
I have always advocated against the use of taxpayers’ money to feed inmates that are violating our common value system because it is wrong to me. We are where we are because of the challenge of awaiting trial inmates that you cannot deploy into farms and other money earning ventures. If the reverse is the case and there are 70-75 per cent convicted inmates, we can deploy them to our various farm centres where they can work and make money to feed themselves, take care of their personal needs and take care of even their dependants outside.
What do you think can be done to address the challenge of pre-trial inmates?
Like I earlier said, over 90 per cent of the inmates in custody committed state offences so the states’ judiciary must be able to speedily address this challenge. The governors need to take special interest in justice dispensation as related to speedy trial of offenders in custody awaiting trial. It is the governors that appoint the Chief Judges in their states, so they can call them and develop a framework for speedy trial of inmates. If the gap is in the arrest and prosecution period, investigation and prosecution procedure or capacity building in proper case presentation, then these gaps should be addressed such that once an inmate goes on trial; it is concluded in no time.
If the inmate is found not guilty, then he should be allowed to go home, and this means he ceases to be a financial burden. Once the governors get their acts right, the trial process will be smooth at the state level.
How do we encourage the implementation of non-custodial measures to help in decongesting the centres?
This is another area where the judiciary and the police authorities and all other agencies with powers to arrest need a lot of orientation, training and capacity building. The NCoS Act 2019 has a provision for non-custodial measures. The act is mindful of overcrowding custodial centres with minor offenders. That was why it provides that instead of letting minor infractions run the full course of justice procedure, non-custodial punishment should be applied.
