The Executive Director of Prisoner’s Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), Dr. Uju Agomoh, has stressed the need to reintegrate former inmates of custodial centres of the Nigeria Correctional Services (NCS).
She argued that societies and families that fail to reintegrate ex-offenders into their folds would further force them to the world to embrace hard criminal networks “and that will be worse for the country.”
Dr. Agomoh spoke at a two-day workshop on: Inmates’ Behavioural and Cognitive Modification Programmes, organised by the Prison Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) for Nigeria Correction Service (NCS) officers from Zone A and held in Ikeja, Lagos.
The theme was: “Remedial Programmes Symbiotic Reinforcement.”
Dr Agomoh addressed the topic: “Nigerian Correctional Service Act 2019 and Faith-Based Correctional Programmes”.
She cautioned against stigmatisation of persons who have served their terms and fully reformed if they must settle back in the society peacefully adding that the process of reintegrating back into the society must stand on three tripods viz “The victim, the family and the community.”
Agomoh said: “The family has got to accept this person. If the family doesn’t accept this person, he would rather run to friends who might be drug users. If society will begin to stigmatise the person both when they are in custody and when they are outside custody, we as a society will be worse for it again and, as I said, we need to engage with the offender in such a way to reduce a repeat of the offending behaviour.
“That provision that talks about this in the constitution is something that we need to revisit.
It is not just about what we put in the law, it is about how we implement it.
“How do we take steps and ensure that everyone who comes out of the custodial facility is supported and not stigmatised against? Is supported to begin to live a law-abiding life because if you don’t, nothing does not exist in a vacuum, they would go the other way.”
She urged stakeholders to join hands to make “this important thing work, to make it possible.”
Agomoh said: Every agency that is involved in socialisation, including the faith agencies, needs to be very careful about what we do because we play a critical role. Some of the things we do can actually promote stigmatisation or de-emphasise stigmatisation.
“We can decide to throw away the bath water with the baby or we can decide to just throw away the bath water, pick the baby and clean it up. That cleaning up is not what one agency can do alone or what one individual can do alone, it must be a cooperative or collaborative effort for us to get it right.
“I think it is only when we begin to do this that our justice system will begin to have a human face, and it does need to have a human face and that does not negate the focus and interest of the support mechanism that needs to happen for the offender not because you like the offender but because you want to reduce the offender’s chances of re-offending.”
