If you have ever used a phone
with an annoying ring tone, then you would have known by now that, the most
prudent thing to do under such circumstances is to usually alter the settings
to vibration mode or in worst cases, put it on silence, which relieves us and
everybody on our timeline, the cacophony of an aching siren which is mistaken
as a tone. But do we loathe ourselves should the phone be misplaced afterwards?
The first thing we do when we
misplace our phone is to reach out for an alternative phone to call the missing
one, just so we can be directed to where the ringing is emanating from, and should
your ring tone be set to ‘off’ or to its lowest decibels at the time of missing,
then your guess is as good as mine and it is this line of thought where we take
actions without recourse to what can happen in the future is what has motivated
me to research into the Prison system here in Ghana so that should I find
myself being gaoled by any twist of fate, I can find solace in the fact that, I
didn’t lower the level of my ring tone.
Prison according to Wikipedia is
a place in which people are physically confined and usually deprived of a range
of personal freedoms. Other terms the Prison is referred
to as is penitentiary also known as pen, correctional facility, remand centre,
detention center, jail or gaol and many more as would be discussed in this
write-up.
It is however worthy to note that
there was a traditional system which saw to it that wrong doers were either
banished or ‘cleansed’ by performing rituals and reinstated into society prior
to the introduction of the Prisons Systems. The Prison system which abolished
the former way of punishing and rehabilitating deviants in society was thus established
to give safe custody to Prisoners, ensuring their welfare by protecting their
rights to good health, clothing, bedding among other basic requirements and
lastly, reforming and rehabilitating them by offering them opportunities to
develop a set of skills through trade, training and moral education but the
multi-million dollar question which begs to be asked is, are these functions
for which these Prisons were built
being met?
A Prison among other things
should have a religious facility, educational facility such as a library, a gym
or a place to exercise, a healthcare facility to offer medical care,
psychiatric services, dental and a recreational facility which may contain at
least a TV and I want to know how far we have gone to address all these
requirements as a nation and if not, then what is government doing about it?
There are currently 45 Prison
establishments scattered all over the country with varying levels security such
as the closed and open security systems for those who have passed their ‘FLED’
(Full license eligibility date) or those given the ROTL (release on temporary
license) to visit home from time to time which is usually a quarter of the way
through the Prison sentence but our security system is still nothing to write
home about.
Do we have motion sensors to
check the wrongful movements of inmates? What about sniffer dogs and roving
patrols that will ensure that no stone is left unturned against those who are
likely to break jail? What about defensible main gates and armed guard towers
where movement from a distance can be monitored?
The Prison system as an extension
of the Ministry of Justice aims at punishing and rehabilitating criminals as
defined by the law but you realize that the Prison service is mostly interested
in only the retributive aspect of their mandate. This is because most of the
inmates come out worse than they went inside and you are tempted to ask if they
are actually trained to master their acts that sent them there in the first
place.
A Prison system requires that an
officer be made responsible for the welfare and supervision of three Prisoners
but the ratio in Ghana has risen above six criminals to one officer and counting.
Even though the Prison service has been understaffed for a very long time, it
is laudable to note that, the quality in the personnel has improved over the
years due to the qualification of new recruits.
The Prison service in its effort
to upgrade structures to meet the ever demanding and increasing number of
criminals however has institutional bottlenecks that continually make lack of
funds persistent. They are not granted the right amount of money needed to
upgrade facilities which is an indictment to the powers that be and this goes a
long way to make the living conditions of the inmates palpable and gross.
Inmates are allowed to sleep,
urinate, eat and attend to nature’s calls in their cells and this is an
infringement on their rights because they are a part of society and should not
be treated inhumanely, not to talk about the diseases they can contract living under
such circumstances.
The Prison service in its effort
as part of restructuring the rehabilitation and to give a sense of dignity to
the inmates has proposed to change their name from Ghana Prisons service to
Ghana correctional service since the year 2007, but is yet to be approved by an
act of parliament which would in tend give the law a force. As to why the bill
is yet to be promulgated into a law after six years and counting is another
area we will look at some other time.
Our system has no ‘deferred
sentence’ where for one reason or the other, one’s sentence can be deferred
until they are ready to serve their terms. Examples can be given of pregnant
women who are sentenced to jail terms and allowed to deliver and cater for
their new born babies with the scanty resources that are provided to the
inmates. Ill-health is also another reason why deferred sentences has to be
introduced into our penal system so that inmates can be given special
treatments at home until they are fit again to continue serving their terms.
Currently, there are about 14,000
inmates who are sharing resources meant for about 8000 inmates and you can tell
that, the situation is purely a matter of the fittest surviving against all
odds. Most people are not supposed to be there in the first place and this
behooves the justice system to expedite trials on remand Prisoners who in some
instances would be acquitted and discharged or imprisoned to ease the pressure
off the resources and to also mitigate wrongful punishment of people because
justice delayed is justice denied.
Apparently, most of these remand Prisoners
mostly are there because they have not been able to afford a lawyer and that is
bad. The government has to furnish these people with lawyers on pro bono basis
to see to it that justice is dispensed timely, which can go a long way to boost
the capacity of the justice system and to help people build confidence in the
system.
We can also reduce the number of
these remand Prisoners by sentencing them to undertaking community services.
The government can make use of these deviants by putting them to work in their
communities to help clean the communities or help contribute their quota to the
community by doing diligently what they have been tasked to do and this can
also go a long way to serve as a deterrent to others, because the idea of the
justice system is not necessarily to be retributive but to help people change
and become good citizens.
Ghana happens to be one of the
destinations that still make use of archaic Prison infrastructures dating as
far back as four hundred years e.g. James fort, which was built for only 200
people but now houses about 740 inmates per the data available as at the time
of reviewing the available literature.
There are no proper transport
systems to convey inmates to and from the field where they sometimes work.
Exposing and leaving these inmates on their own can be dangerous to the Prison
Guards and society at large, because some hardly reform, as they keep plotting
their vengeance, especially, those who were wrongfully incarcerated.
There is no gainsaying that the
food given to the inmates is of bad quality and mal-nutritional, but it is
probably because, government is not giving them much. Alternatively, i do not
think the tax payer’s money should be channeled into feeding Prisoners. Most of
these Prisoners could be made to work and keep large acres of farm lands,
especially those who are sentenced with hard labor. The state cannot be at
their brunt while they were free and still spend its money on them while
incarcerated and proper management of this situation can even give the nation a
surplus from their produce.
Sadly, most of these inmates only
come back into society as hardened criminals because there are no
adequate
training and education for them. Recidivism; the act of relapsing into criminal
activities, abounds in our society because there are no workshops to train
these inmates and where there are, they are not operational and no one seems to
care because the crime or neglect being perpetrated is not directly on our
doorsteps.
Most of these deviants sifted
from the public domain and named as Prisoners ended there in the first place
through no fault of theirs but through system failure. A system that sentences
an unemployed young man for uprooting a neighbor’s cassava without his consent
and tries an employed civil servant forever for embezzling public funds meant
for the collective growth of everyone is certainly a failed system.
These Prisoners must be helped to
regain their sense of worth and self-esteem to be able to be re-integrated into
society without problem. It will be a step in the right direction if social and
civil organizations can come out to help the government to tackle the problems
and solutions herein by donating and sponsoring some of the things needed to
fully rehabilitate the system and it’s dependents in a bid to making this place
a better place for all of us.
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