Categorise prisoners, Professor Twumasi

Sunyani (Brong Ahafo) 27 May '99

The Chairman of the Ghana Prison Council, Professor Patrick Twumasi, on Tuesday urged the Prison Administration to consider categorising the Prison population into classes based on the gravity of crime committed.

He said the present situation where all inmates are kept together undermines reformation.

"It is dangerous to group first time offenders and hardened criminals in one place as it would obviously lead the hardened ones influencing, negatively, the first timers," Professor Twumasi said at the inauguration of the Brong Ahafo Regional Prison committee at Sunyani.

He underscored the need for Prison Officers to avoid sadism in the treatment of prisoners.

He said prisoners are human in spite of their incarceration and it is important that they are treated with dignity to facilitate their reformation and successful integration into the society after their terms.

He also called on the Prison Administration to explore and initiate ways of making inmates productive.

The government, conscious of the role skills acquisition could play in helping to rehabilitate prisoners, is taking steps to refurbish all the workshops in the country's Prisons, Prof. Twumasi said.

Professor Twumasi, therefore, urged the Prison Authorities to find Innovative and creative ways of improving prison conditions.

The Prison Service now has a new image and is crucial that the Prison Service and Prisons in the country are run as humanly and productive as Possible, he said. Professor Twumasi deplored the over-crowding conditions in the country's prisons and appealed to the police and the courts to cut down on the number of suspects consigned to remands on petty offences.

Currently, 23 per cent of the 8,000 prison inmates in the country are on remand. If the courts and the police would allow such people out on bail, the prisons would be decongested.

The Regional Minister, Mr Donald Adabre, who is the Chairman of the Regional Prisons Committee, said it is not only criminals who are sent to prison as borne out by the country's political history "where people are imprisoned for their one safety.

"It therefore behoves every Ghanaian, to help make conditions in the country's prisons better as anybody could find himself there".

The Director-General of the Ghana Prison Service, Brigadier Alex Djangmah, admitted that the Service is fraught with problems but said he was hopeful that with the inauguration of the Regional Prison Committees things would change for the better.

The 13-member committee charged with assisting and advising the Ghana Prison Service to improve conditions of inmates, draws its membership from the Ministry of Health, the Ghana Bar Association and the Attorney-General's Department among other organisations.