Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
President Muhammadu Buhari has assented to an Act changing the name of Nigeria Prisons Service to Correctional Service.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters, Senator Ita Enang, disclosed this to State House Correspondents Wednesday.
According to him, the Nigerian Correctional Service Act, 2019, repeals the Prisons Acts and changes the name from Nigeria Prisons Service to Nigerian Correctional Service, otherwise known as “the Correctional Service.”
The new law allows inmates on death row that have spent more than 10 years without execution and has exhausted all legal procedures for appeal and a period of 10 years has elapsed to the sentence to be commuted to to life imprisonment.
Enang also explained that for inmates who undergo vocational training or skills acquired, the law states that the money made from their ventures while in custody will be divided into three: the person who produces will take one third, the Correction Service will take one third and the last one third will go to Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation.
Enang explained: “There are, according to the Act, two main faculties of the Correctional Service, namely: Custodial Service and Non-custodial Service.
“The Custodial Service is to: (a) custody and take control of persons legally interned in safe, secure and humane conditions. (b) Conveying remand persons to and from courts in motorized formations;
(c) Identifying the existence and causes of anti-social behaviours of inmates; (d) Conducting risk and needs assessment aimed at developing appropriate correctional treatment methods for reformation, rehabilitation and reintegration;
(e) Implementing reformation and rehabilitation programmes to enhance the reintegration of inmates back into the society
(f) Initiating behavior modification in inmates through the provision of medical, psychological, spiritual and counseling services for all offenders including violent extremists
(g) empowering inmates through the deployment of educational and vocational skills training programmes, and facilitating incentives and income generation through Custodial Centres, farms and industries
(h) Administering borstal and related institutions;
(I) Providing support to facilitate the speedy disposal of cases of persons awaiting trial; and It further provides in Section 12 (2) (c):
“that where an inmate sentenced to death has exhausted all legal procedures for appeal and a period of 10 years has elapsed without execution of the sentence, the Chief Judge may commute the sentence of death to life imprisonment. And Section 12 (8) empowers the state Controller of the Service to reject more intakes of inmates where it is apparent that the correctional centre in question is filled to capacity.
Enang said under the Nigerian Non-Custodian Service, the non-custodial faculty of the Correctional Service “is responsible for the administration of non-custodial measures, namely: Community Service, probation, parole, restorative justice measures and such other measures as a court of competent jurisdiction may order. “Restorative Justice measure approved in the Act include victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing, community mediation and other conciliatory measures as may be deemed necessary pre-trial, trial during imprisonment or even post- imprisonment stages.”
Asked how long should the president assent to bills that was passed by the 8th Senate Assembly that was dissolved June 8th, 2019, Enang said, “When a bill is passed it goes through a process National Assembly management, particularly the legal department of the office of the Clark to National Assembly. The time of Mr. President begins to run from the date that the bills are transmitted to him.