Oladimeji Ramon
There is a growing trend of incarcerating children and juvenile offenders in prison facilities meant for adult offenders in the country.
Stakeholders in the child criminal justice sector blame the disturbing trend on the activities of law enforcement agents, especially policemen, who are known to up the age of minor offenders for the purpose of incarcerating them in regular adult prisons.
Experts believe that policemen and other law enforcement agents engage in this fraudulent act to avoid the trouble of travelling long distances to drop such minor offenders in borstal homes and correctional centres, which are few and far between in the country.
While decrying the ugly trend of lumping children and juvenile offenders with adult inmates, including hardened criminals, child justice experts warned that the practice had dire consequences for the country and advocated that it should stop.
They made this call last week in Lagos at a one-day summit, with the theme, “Reforming Juvenile Justice Administration in Nigeria, Ending the Detention of Juveniles with Adults.”
The summit, which held in the Conference Hall, Office of the Public Defender at Surulere, was organised by an advocacy group, Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants.
CURE-Nigeria organised the summit in collaboration with the National Human Rights Commission and the OPD.
In attendance were Justice M.O. Obadina, who represented the Chief Judge of Lagos State, Justice Opeyemi Oke; the Lagos Coordinator, NHRC, Mr Lucas Koyejo, who represented the Executive Secretary, NHRC, Mr Anthony Ojukwu; and the Director, OPD, Mrs Olayinka Adeyemi, who attended on behalf of herself and the Attorney General of Lagos State, Mr Adeniji Kazeem (SAN).
Also in attendance were the Controller of Prisons, Lagos State, Mr Tunde Ladipo; the Head, Child and Adolescent Centre, Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, Dr Grace Ijarogbe; DSP Damisa Barbara, who represented the Chairman, Lagos State Task Force on Environmental Offences, Mr Yinka Egbeyemi; and the National President of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, Mr Malachy Uwgummadu.
While setting the tone for the discourse, the Lagos Coordinator, NHRC, Mr Lucas Koyejo, said the summit became important and urgent against the backdrop of the rising “phenomenon of finding children being detained with adults,” a practice, he said, was particularly rampant in prisons in Lagos State.
The NHRC coordinator stated that the practice was a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as the Child Rights Law.
These laws, Koyejo explained, provided that “child offenders should not be imprisoned, especially where the offence can be dealt with by fine or community service.”
The laws provide that in worst cases such juveniles should be detained in an approved institution.”
“Unquestionably, jailing children with adults needlessly puts them at greater risk. This is so because children at that age are still at the developmental stage and their malleability is higher, making them particularly vulnerable to criminal socialisation when incarcerated with adults,” Koyejo noted.
He said by incarcerating child and juvenile offenders with adults, the system was defeating the purpose of keeping such children in custody, which is rehabilitation.
Deepening the discourse, the Executive Director, CURE-Nigeria, Uhaa, identified poverty, inadequate education and breakdown in family ties as some of the factors exposing young people to crimes.
Uhaa said the focus of the juvenile criminal justice system, therefore, ought not to be punitive but should be geared towards helping the errant young people by rehabilitating them so that they can become useful to themselves and the society.
“What we need to do is to apply concerted efforts to find solutions to these problems, not harsh and overly punitive laws and policies.
“The treatment of juveniles in conflict with the law as adults, such as trying them in adult courts, sending them to adult prisons, is not only illegal and violate international and domestic laws, but it is also counter-productive, inhumane, cruel and wicked and violate the principle of parenspatriae – state as parents – and does us no good,” Uhaa said.
He called on the various agents of government, both state and federal, to respect all international and domestic laws governing the administration of juvenile justice in dealing with juveniles who come in conflict with the law.
Also speaking, the Director, OPD, Adeyemi, said since children are the future of the society, efforts ought to be made to invest in them, protect and safeguard their interest.
Adeyemi said with the current trend, the nation might be sitting on an impending crisis.
“Studies have shown that incarcerated children have significant mental health needs and with many children facing a life of inadequate care, poor health and education, slowly, but surely, we will have a crisis to contend with if care is not taken,” she warned.
Adeyemi blames police
Blaming the police for the ugly trend the OPD Director said, “One of the challenges we have is the issue from police stations because from our interactions with these children we’ve been told that arresting police officers often tell them to up their age and they will be taken to adult prisons and we do not know how we will stop that.
“You cannot blame the court so much, because the court might not be able to determine the age of an accused. When we find juveniles in the prison custody, what we do is to ensure that they are sent to correctional homes if they are charged with serious, non-bailable offences. Where it is a bailable offence, we track their parents and make sure that they are released to their parents while we play the role of counsel.”
Adeyemi, however, said it might be difficult to punish policemen who deliberately falsify age of minor offenders.
She said, “All we are concerned about is the child offender, to get him out of prison; we are not really concerned about the police officer, because the police officer will tell you that it was the child that gave them his age and it will be his word against the child.”
Adeyemi noted that as of last week, the OPD had 72 cases of children offenders, which it was defending on pro bono, noting that 20 of them were from the boy’s correctional centre, 22 from Ikoyi Prison, five from Medium Security Prison, Kirikiri and 10 from the Federal Borstal Home, Adigbe.
“It is particularly worrisome to find children incarcerated with adults in prisons. We all agree that reform and rehabilitation, not punishment, are the guiding principles of the Child Rights Law and that a child in conflict with the law is a child in difficult circumstances, who has fallen out of the protective net at some point and has been robbed of an opportunity of a safe and secure childhood,” Adeyemi said.
She called for proper and timely intervention that will strengthen the rehabilitation process and reduce reliance on institutionalisation.
The Controller of Prisons, Lagos State, Mr Tunde Ladipo, said the prisons authorities found the issue of incarcerating children and juvenile offenders in adult prisons as worrisome as other stakeholders.
Like Adeyemi, Ladipo blamed the police and other arresting agencies for the trend.
He said, “The issue of juveniles in prison has been an issue much talked about as problematic in our judicial system. We in the prisons frown upon it. As you know, inmates are brought to the prison with warrants and when they are brought we just don’t reject them. But the problem is that before being brought to the prison, the arresting agencies would have, in many cases, changed the age of an inmate, maybe from 16 to 18 or 20. And at times, some of the arrested persons don’t even know their dates of birth. And when they bring them like that, we can’t reject them.”
The prison controller said he had since devised a strategy to stop the trend, noting that officers under him had been mandated “to ensure that whoever that is being brought to the prison that looks like an underage, should be investigated by going to the court to find out if the age written in their warrant is correct and if need be, medical check-up can also be undertaken to ascertain the age of an inmate who we feel is an underage.”
Prison controller decries congestion, blames Lagos task force
However, Ladipo lamented the congested state of the five prisons in the state, which, he said, currently housed about 9,000 inmates.
He called out the Lagos State Task Force on Environmental Offences for the congested state of the prisons.
He said, “In Lagos State, the problem has been that of the task force and the mobile courts and quite a number of times, we have discussed this issue and what we have now and why we have congestion in the prison is that we see young men and women being arrested on the streets for lack of means of livelihood. That speaks volumes.”
Ladipo commended the Chief Judge, Justice Opeyemi Oke, for being responsive to the calls by the prisons authorities, noting that in one day the Chief Judge released 80 inmates from the Badagry Prison.
Speaking on behalf of the Chairman, Lagos State Task Force on Environmental Offences, Egbeyemi, his representative, Damisa Barbara, named shortage of cells to hold juvenile offenders as a major problem confronting the agency.
Barbara said, “We in the Lagos State Task Force on environmental offence come across children on a daily basis; children that are taken from various police stations they bring them to the task force office.
“On a daily basis, we can have between 10 and 15 of them. We have a major problem in that area because we have just four cells. We have tried to reserve one of the cells for juvenile offenders but the problem we have with the children is that it is usually difficult for us to locate their parents and often we are left with taking them to the family court and when we get there some of these children are taken to the borstal home at Ojota. But right now, that place is filled up and cannot accommodate more.
“So, what we do now is to counsel these juvenile offenders and release them. But you find that between two and three days, the children are brought back. This is a major problem that we have at the task force.”
Barbara, on behalf of Egbeyemi, appealed to the state government to build a new remand home for minor offenders, where they could be held for about three days and counselled before being released to their parents.
Juveniles in adult prisons prone to abuse
Head, Child and Adolescent Centre, Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos, Dr Grace Ijarogbe, named physical and emotional abuse of young people as the most dire consequences of keeping minors in adult prisons.
“By reason of their size, physical strength and mental capacity, a juvenile in an adult prisons can be forced to participate in activities that he or she does not want to participate in; there is the risk of sodomy,” the consultant neuropsychiatrist said.
She noted that among the young offenders freed from Badagry Prison by the Chief Judge, there were quite a number who had become psychotic, resulting from battling with scabies, a very itchy skin infection.
“Scabies is an infection of the skin and it very itchy and some of the children had lived with it for six months without being treated; they scratched and their skins were covered with bruises and the drug costs only N70,” Ijarogbe said.
The Chief Judge, represented by Justice Obadina, said even when kept in facilities for underage offenders, juvenile offenders must be grouped according to their alleged crime.
The Chief Judge charged the stakeholders to go beyond holding talks to taking concrete steps to end the menace of detaining juveniles in adult prisons.
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