The Nigeria Correctional Service has urged the people to support its social reintegration programme for former convicted felons by avoiding the pitfall of stigmatisation.
The Controller of Corrections, Cross River State Command, Mr. Suanu Kinane made the call in Calabar, the capital of Cross River State, south-south Nigeria.
Kinane, who played host to the executives of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ Cross River State Council, lamented the constant rejection and stigmatisation of freed and reformed inmates that have served their legal term.
He explained that with the Criminal Justice Law in place, the rejection of reformed inmates by employers was abrogated.
“Once an individual has served his term, he is free to be reintegrated. The correctional centres reorient inmates. That is why it is no longer called Prison, but Corrections Centres.
“We have helped many o be reintegrated with the reform programme introduced by the Controller General. There are reformed inmates, who are undergraduates and post graduates to the extent that some have completed Masters Programmes and a few undergoing PHD (Doctors of Philosophy),” Kinane stated.
Speaking further, the Controller said “they (inmates) wear the toga of stigmatization having passed through the facility they are faced with outright rejection. When they face segregation and outright rejection from the society, what happened is that they deliberately commit crimes just to return to the centre,
“So, once these brothers and sisters of ours are discharged into the society, they should not be rejected. We should receive them, accept them. I am appealing to the media to help us educate the people about the new role we have, it is a shift from the old. We have custodial and non-custodial centres working hard to facilitate the reforms of inmates,” he stressed.
Involving communities
Kinane explained that the Command was also taking steps to educate communities, governments at the state and local levels including traditional and religious leaders on its programme, which involves reformation, rehabilitation and reintegration of inmates, a clear departure from punitive to correctional.
“The bottom line in what we do is that human resource is never wasted. To achieve this society in general has a role to play in curbing crime. Society can stop recycling crime by stopping the rejection, segregation and stigmatization of freed, reformed inmates. To this end, we have started advocacy visits to institutions in the state and we intend to take it to the local government level,” he reiterated.
Kinane expressed appreciation to the leadership of the NUJ for the visit, which he described as a platform to establish a symbiotic relationship to advance the course of humanity and security.
In his remark, the Chairman of the Cross River State NUJ, Mr. Gill Nsa said that the visit was aim at creating a partnership with the command to gather accurate information for dissemination to the public.
Gill reiterated the commitment of mainstream Journalists to counter the scourge of fake news mostly spread through social media.
He urged that the service should operate an open door policy for media to easily have access to relevant information for public consumption.
Confidence Okwuchi
