CHALLENGES OF REFORMS IN THE NIGERIAN PRISON SYSTEM: LESSONS FROM U.S.A AND SOUTH AFRICA

Florence Chukwudi

Department of Psychology

Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

The aim of establishing the prison institution in all parts of the world including Nigeria is to provide a rehabilitation and correctional facility for people who have violated the rules and regulations of their society. The extent to which this is true in practice has been a subject of discussion. An observation of the population that goes in and out of the prisons in Nigeria shows that there are some problems in the system, hence the prison system has not been able to live up to its expected role in Nigeria. Base on this, the paper stresses on why reform is necessary in the Nigerian prisons. Some of the reasons include reforming the prisoners to be better than what they were before they were imprisoned, rehabilitating the prisoners in order to equip them with new skills or improve on their old ones, and seclude criminals from the rest of the society, pending when they have changed. Theories of the prison as a social system, are used in this paper, such as the structural-functionalist approach of the system theory for the study of human society and culture as proposed by Radcliff-Brown of the British school of social anthropology and later developed by Meyer Fortes and Max Gluckman is used in explaining prison environment etc. The researcher looked at the problems of Nigerian prison system, challenges and Rationale for reform of the Nigerian prison, various reform attempted, then lessons Nigerian prison should learn from other countries that have a successful running of prisons system in their countries and how to realize a sustainable prisons system in Nigerian. The conclusion is drawn based on the findings.     

Key word: Prisons, reforms, congestion, overcrowding, policy.