EVALUATING CRIME CONTROL AND REHABILITATION PROGRAMMES IN KIRIKIRI AND KUJE PRISONS

 

 

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Generally, news of crime and criminal acts elicit different reactions from the people. Sometimes people are intrigued, attracted or repelled, amused or frightened. While interest in crime has usually been high, understanding why it occurs and what to do about it has always been a problem. As every other area of life and human behavior, there is no shortage of experts and experts’ opinion starting from public officials, politicians, philosophers and the academes. The inability of the society and its agencies to prevent crime stems from our failure to understand criminal behavior and why there is crime in the first place.

The reality is that crime is inevitable and has both positive and negative roles to play in human society. However, the worsening economy of most of the sub-Saharan African countries including Nigeria, have contributed a lot to the level and sophistication of crime in the world. Intensity of crime has also been deepening with crises in the economy such that level and sophistication of crime has also changed over time in terms of sophistication of weaponry and the level of intelligence employed especially in cybercrime related incidents. In traditional societies, criminal activities manifested in petty crime such as stealing, burglary, rape among others. However, with increase in the level of unemployment and education, Nigeria has now witnessed high level of criminal activities.

With the rise in the number of urban areas and the depletion of the rural areas, crime has also become intensified. While majority of the states in Nigeria are rapidly urbanising due to modernisation and technological advancement, ironically, attendant to this affluence is also a rise in the level of criminality experienced in those states. The level of criminality experienced has moved from petty crime to highly sophisticated and intellectual crimes such as kidnapping, vandalisation of oil pipelines, daylight bank robberies with a high level of sophistication and armaments that surpassed even those of the police who are supposed to assured the society of its safety.

State response to this development has not been encouraging even to the extent that it has been opined that the state has no answer to these crimes. The sophistication and intensity of crime appears to have overwhelmed state response and agencies ability to curb or control it. It would seem that while the criminals are developing with time in terms of sophistication of weapons and gallantry, the state institutions seem to have remained static and stagnant, often times bereft of ideas and innovation on how to combat crime. The reason for this is not farfetched and can be located in institutional decay, corruption and general malaise of governance that have affected both the society and security agencies, which are part of the larger society. At the level of governance, there is an intellectual pit, which has not been able to forge a link between the increasing level of crime and the deepening crisis of the state political economy. The crisis is also a reflection of the state’s inability to provide and also give an assurance of the provision of the basic necessity of food, shelter, clothing and security of life and property for the citizenry.

The result is that in the quest for orderliness there has been a propensity in human societies to control and reduce offending behavior from citizenry. However, when prevention fails the option of punishing the offenders through legal systems and imprisonment remains a widely used method of formal punishment during which offenders are deprived of the freedom they previously enjoyed. This underscore, the use of prison services as institutions for the control and reform of criminals.The underlying principle of modern prisons system therefore, is to improve, rehabilitate, deter the offender and others, and prepare him to play a fit and proper part in society once released. Prison therefore provides a confinement where socially and legally interned people who wronged the society are kept for reformation, rehabilitation and possible reintegration (Ugwuoke, Utido & Nura, 2015).

Although McCorkle and Korn (1954) have defined prison as a physical structure in a geographical location where a number of people live under highly specialized conditions that is different from the larger society, the idea behind imprisonment is to separate for transformation, those that society considers unfit or as threat to cohabit with due to their criminal behavior.Generally, imprisonment becomes an aspect of punishment, just as the reattribute and the deterrent philosophers have stressed.Thus, a deviant is punished in order to pay him back for his actions and to deter him/her or others from committing similar offence or crime (Obioha, 2011). As crime control measure, imprisonment is most appropriately conceived as a formal perspective of inflicting pain on the individuals, which has been an aspect of the traditional criminal justice system in various society including Nigeria.