The Prisoners Rehabilitation and Well-fare Action has urged governments to ensure proper implementation of Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 to tackle the problem of awaiting trial persons.
Olayinka Lawal, the Acting Executive Director, made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria on Monday in Abuja.
He said that some states had passed their own versions of the Administration of the Criminal Justice Act while many had not done so.
Lawal said: “The beauty of this legislation is that it makes provision to address that challenge of awaiting trial persons for a long period of time.
“So what that policy or legislation does is to put in contest the solution to that challenge of removing from the prisons those that are awaiting trial.
“It is also to ensure that those in prisons awaiting trial spend a minimum time there; the law says 14 and 30 days.
“Ideally, with the new legal frame work on, the awaiting trial persons are not to spend more than one or two months in custody in pre-trial detention, so this will go a long way to tackle the problem.”
Lawal said that about 10 states had passed the law and hoping that the problem in this process would be solved to a large extent by the implementation of the ACJA.
Lawal said that States such as Lagos and Anambra, which had passed the law for long, were still having some challenges with the prisons.
According to him, this is because the laws are not being implemented the way they ought to be.
He said: “But if they are, we wouldn’t be seeing those challenges again in states that have passed and are implementing their ACJA.
“So the solution is to ensure that the law is implemented the way it ought to and then we will see an improved situation.
“And for the states that have not passed it, they should pass their own version so that we can have this challenge put behind us.”
Lawal said that in many prisons across the country, there were large numbers of awaiting trial persons and “this portends danger”.
He lamented: “We have a situation that those that are in the prisons on awaiting trial lists are there whiling away time and in the process they convey bad influences.
“These tendencies at times make many of them come out worse than they ought to, that is the reality of our situation and it is an issue we need to tackle and tackle appropriately.
“We do not have a proper rehabilitation programme for the inmates, the prisons mandate is when they receive inmates who are supposed to be convicts they are expected to process them.
“This is by reforming them to turn away from criminal tendency, reform them, rehabilitate them and reintegrate them into the society but today we have an anomaly in Nigeria’s prisons.”
PRAWA is a NGO aimed at promoting security, justice, promoting prison reforms, social development and rehabilitation programme.