THERE is a problem with the criminal justice system in Nigeria. And it is time the judiciary took the bull by the horns by initiating necessary and pragmatic reforms to fix the problem. The following statistics reeled off recently by the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Prison Service, Mr. Olusola Ogundipe, perhaps, captures the enormity of the

challenge at hand: As of July 31, 2010, the total population of prisoners in the country was 47,628. Of this figure, only 13,300 or 23 per cent were convicted persons while the balance of 34,328 or 77 per cent constituted awaiting trial inmates. Out of the over 34,000 awaiting trial persons, 17,164 had been kept in the prison for between five and 17 years. This is the sorry state of the prison and justice system in Nigeria. By the time we add the teeming population of suspects in police cells across the nation to this, the situation becomes scarier.

OGUNDIPE, who made the above disclosure at a roundtable conference on prison reforms in Abuja, attributed the problem of prison congestion to the multiplication of judicial and police divisions without a corresponding upgrading in the infrastructure of the prison system. While the Comptroller-General may be correct in situating the problem of prison congestion in the country, the causes of prison congestion surely go beyond infrastructural issues. The chief culprit is the seemingly faulty criminal justice system. Thus, while the proposed prison reform is welcome, what needs more urgent reform is the criminal justice system, in which prison reform becomes a subset. Any prison reform undertaken without taking a holistic view of the criminal justice system will be ineffective. The point being made here is that whatever reform that would be carried out to decongest the prisons must permeate the police, courts and prisons which are the three cardinal institutions in the criminal justice system.

THE police, by design, begin the criminal justice system. It is the first institution that a crime suspect interfaces with and whether or not the other institutions in the justice system would be involved in a case is largely determined by the police. Where the police diligently carry out their duty of ‘sieving’ the suspects via painstaking investigation and tidy evidence gathering, the engine of the criminal justice system runs smoothly thereafter. But, often times, this is not the case. The police are very weak in intelligence and evidence gathering. Investigations are carried out in a shoddy manner and even when they do not have evidence to charge a suspect to court, they are not willing to let go, moreso if the suspect is unable to ‘buy’ his/her freedom.

USING the instrumentality of holding charge, and at the instance of the police, criminal suspects’ detention is approved by magistrate courts which may not even  have jurisdiction over the crime said to have been committed in the first place. The essence is to keep the suspects in prison custody until the police can find evidence of guilt against them. Thus, detention based on holding charge arising from investigation failure on the part of the police is the main cause of prison congestion in the country. Many people that are in prison custody today and purportedly awaiting trial have no business being there in the first place.

AND in some  few instances where the police did their job well and put together sufficient evidence and charged suspected criminals to courts with proper jurisdiction, criminal cases could sometimes be painfully slow. In a situation where the case at issue is not bailable, the accused remains in prison custody until the case is disposed of. For instance, the murder and attempted murder cases involving the former Chief Security Officer (CSO) to the late General Sani Abacha, Al-Mustapha and some associates of the former late head of state, which began about 10 years ago, are yet to be decided and the accused have been remanded in prison custody since then.

THE truth is that there are many protracted criminal cases like that of Al-Mustapha and in courts across the land. Therefore, part of the reforms being envisaged should ensure that an accused person’s right to speedy trial is not deliberately trampled upon. There is this cardinal principle of law that says justice delayed is justice denied. Any reform that captures the essence of this principle will help to restore the rights of accused persons under the law, restore the dignity of man, affirm the dictum that an accused is deemed innocent until proved otherwise, and ultimately lessen prison congestion.

ORDINARILY, the prison should become relevant after the police had done a good job and the courts had convicted the accused. The convicts are expected to remain in prison for the term of their sentences. The prison system, on the other hand, is expected to carry out reformation programmes that will enable the inmates to be integrated back to the society after their prison terms. But this objective is hardly being achieved because a larger portion of the prison system’s resources and time are devoted to managing and catering for awaiting trial inmates, who constitutes 77 per cent of the inmates in the prison. It  is, therefore, clear that at every level of the three  institutions that are involved in the criminal justice system, there are challenges to be tackled if the embarrassing figure of awaiting trial inmates in the prison system is to reduce significantly.

THAT 77 per cent of prison inmates in Nigeria are awaiting trial is appalling, intolerable and unacceptable. It is  a clear indictment of the country’s  criminal justice system.  The nation’s criminal justice system comprising the police, court and prison is overdue for reforms, which should be carried out urgently but diligently.  Palliatives would not do. The root causes of prison congestion should be addressed at the levels of the police, court and prison.  We are worried, just like many discerning Nigerians, about the injustice and the social costs of indefinite detention of suspects without trial in 21st Century Nigeria. It is hoped that the relevant authorities, and in particular, the judiciary, will hearken to this clarion call on them to act swiftly to fix the problems in the country’s criminal justice system.

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