An inmate in Nigerian prisons who may just be innocent is faced with several issues such as over population in prison cells, poor quality of food, lack of adequate health care which has led to several deaths in prison, inability to hire a lawyer due to poverty, lack of basic toiletries like toothbrush, paste, soap, slippers and undies, unnecessary long adjournments which have made the inmates to spend more time than necessary, missing case files which has led to non-appearance in courts, mental illness, sexual and drug abuse to mention a few.
A casual observation of the population that goes in and out of the prisons in Nigeria presupposes that there are some problems in the system, hence the prisons system has not been able to live up to its expected role in Nigeria. The worry about the manifestation that Nigerian prisons has not lived up to expectations in terms of impacting positively on lives and vocations of inmates has raised several questions that have not yet been completely addressed on the system’s functions and existence.
The report, covering data from 2011 to 2015, shows that 72.5% of Nigeria’s total prison population are inmates serving time while awaiting trial and without being sentenced. As of October, 2019 the total number of prisoners in Nigeria is 68, 686 with a growing increase of about 5.6%.
Slowness and corruption in the country’s criminal justice system have resulted in an enormous backlog of cases. Out of the nearly 70,000 inmates in the country, only about 24,000 have actually been convicted. That’s means 68 percent of the total prison population is awaiting trial.
Questions raised are: why are inmates not getting the food that they need to get? Who is getting these contracts to feed these inmates? Who are the people and how much is involved?
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