Moro decries number of awaiting trial inmates

The Minister of Interior, Mr. Abba Moro, on Tuesday lamented the huge number of awaiting-trial suspects languishing in various prisons across the country.The minister, who spoke in Ado-Ekiti at the inauguration of a new prison, said about 34,000 out of estimated 48,000 inmates across the prisons in the country were awaiting trial.He said the population of inmates in the old prison in Ado-Ekiti was 331 while 275 of them were awaiting trial and only 56 of them were convicts.He blamed the slow justice administration in the country for the high number of awaiting trial detainees while urging the Attorney General and Minister of Justice and the Police to ensure quick dispensation of cases to decongest the prisons.He said Nigerian Prison Service had been grappling with the challenge of congestion of its facilities especially in urban areas.Moro said, I believe under a democratic setting, the rule of law and in particular, the rights of the people, including the prisoners, must be respected, promoted and guaranteed.I am deeply worried that the conditions of some of the prisons across the country today leaves a lot of room for improvement. We must all rise up and make our prisons reformation centres rather than punishment centres.He stated that the old Ado-Ekiti prison was built in 1922 with 200 beds capacity while the new one was projected to have 650 inmates.The Comptroller General of Prisons, Mr. Olusola Ogundipe, said it was the intention of the service to move away from pre-colonial prisons which were built with mud and archaic facilities to modern facilities where reformation could be done with ease.Ogundipe assured that the service would provide vocational facilities for skills acquisition by the inmates for them to be able to be easily re-integrated into the society after their jail terms.He urged the public not to discriminate against ex-convicts saying they had been exposed to reformation programmes to change their lives.
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