The need for non-custodial sentencing by our courts

By Florence Gbolu
ACCRA (The Chronicle, November 20, 2006)- When The 17-year-old boy wanted to speak to the Minister and his entourage, no one had any idea what he wanted to tell them. With courage, Eric Boafo laid to bare the big burden resting in his heart: “I’m serving a five-year jail term for stealing a fridge motor and other electrical appliances,” he said. “Please, the sentence imposed on me by a court in Winneba is too much and I cannot complete my sentence with regards to the existing conditions in the prison.” Boafo appealed to the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General's Office to mitigate his sentence. Leaders and representatives of agencies in the administration of criminal justice in the country, including the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) Ghana, the General Legal Council, the Prisons Council and Department of Social Welfare, Ministry of Justice and Ministry of the Interior also heard his appeal. The officials were visiting the Winneba Prisons to gain a first-hand knowledge about prison conditions as part of a workshop to finalize and adopt an action plan for non-custodial sentencing in Ghana. Eric, like many other prisoners in the Winneba and other prisons in the country, faced sentencing for his crime in an adult prison instead of a juvenile one. Born in 1988 and convicted in 2005, he said life at the Winneba prison was unbearable and pleaded to be removed from adult prison. While transfers of juvenile prisoners from adult prisons to appropriate juvenile facilities have increased, unsuitable incarceration of young people, as well as nursing mothers and pregnant women, remains a chronic problem. Critics say such prison sentences arrest all attempts at rehabilitation of inmates and have devastating effects on inmates in terms of logistics, living space, and sanitation and health services. The prison infrastructure in Ghana is currently overstrained and bursting at the seams, with severe overcrowding, poor ventilation and widespread malnutrition conditions conducive to the spread of communicable disease improper classification of prisoners. Touring the various rooms of the Winneba prison revealed that only few beds were available for some of the inmates. Some inmates sleep on blankets and towels in congested spaces available. The court, which sits above the prison, has leaky roofs and floors, making it impossible for inmates to stay in their cells when it rains overnight. In some areas, 18 prisoners occupy 10-by-12-foot cells with no beds. Blankets are laid on the floor, and a very small window provides the only ventilation. Cells that have beds appear a bit wider than the remand cells, but have only 14 beds to accommodate as many as 27 prisoners. Though not all the inmates had the chance to talk, those who did complained about how they had been languishing in cells without being sent to courts and how police prosecutors had misinterpreted some of their offences to them. The leader of the inmates, Wellington Yankson, complained about ventilation in the various cells and said due to this problem, most prisoners suffer from various skin infections. He complained also about the attitude of their relations, saying they hardly get any response from them whenever they write to them. The Chief Superintendent of Prisons (CSP), Jacob Teiko Tagoe, said the Winneba Prisons has a maximum capacity of 96, but now had 199 inmates, with number rising to 250. When CSP Tagoe was asked about the feeding fee of the inmates, he said the inmates were entitled to 4,000 cedis for a three square meal adding, "We try as much as possible to give them sliced size of fish twice a month." He complained about lack of accommodation for staff, this issue he said needed serious attention, as it is becoming a security threat to the increasing prison population. But some form of hope was given to these inmates when Mr. Kwame Osei-Prempeh, Deputy Attorney General and Minister for Justice, who said government raised concerns about their plight, and assured them that steps were being taken to ensure that various prison were decongested. At the workshop, the assembled organizations tried to answer the perennial question of where along the continuum of crime and punishment to fit the various types of offenders, offences and punishment and to ensure that a person who has not been convicted of a criminal offence shall not be treated as a convicted person and shall be kept separately from convicted persons. In most, but not all, criminal convictions, Ghanaian courts impose custodial sentences. However, non-custodial sentencing has been proposed for incarcerating offenders in some cases. The objectives of non-custodial sentences are often the same as for custodial sentences (with the exception of protecting society from violent repeat offenders), and include crime prevention, retribution and rehabilitation of offenders. These objectives are weighed against the economic and social cost to the nation of incarcerating offenders.