Juveniles lumped with adult prisoners in Wa Central Prisons

The Wa Central Prisons is forced to lump up juveniles and adult prisoners in the same prison cells due to the lack of adequate space to separate the two.

The practice is however dangerous as the juveniles are exposed to the adult prison culture, thereby, increasing their tendency to become hardened criminals in society when they leave the prisons.

Apart from this, it also promoted the tendency of the younger ones being sodomized by the older prisoners.

Assistant Controller of Prisons (ACP), Mr. Victor Douchebe, the Regional Commander of the Wa Central Prisons, revealed this during a one day capacity building training for the Police and Prison Staff in Wa.

The capacity building training which was focused on improving the quality of juvenile justice services in the Upper West Region was organised by Community Development Alliance (CDA) with funding support from STAR-Ghana.

ACP Victor Douchebe noted that per the prisons classifications, people on remand should be separated from convicts and first offenders from second offenders or recidivists.

In the same way, long/high sentence prisoners should be separated from those serving low sentences while juveniles/young offenders are also separated from the adults.

This is how it should be but because of lack of space we are not able to apply such ideal classification, he stressed.

He appealed to arresting officers to put in enough efforts to establish the true ages so that juveniles would be properly identified from adults and treated accordingly.

Mr. Yussif Kanton, Executive Director of CDA, said juvenile justice was one critical area that needed urgent attention in Ghana.

He stated however that it was evident that many police and prison personnel were not well equipped with the knowledge and information on the various juvenile justice laws to handle juvenile cases.

He added that upon arrest of a juvenile it was often observed that police personnel were mostly unaware of the existing laws and procedures relating to children in conflict with the law thereby ended up infracting these laws.

The CDA Executive Directed noted that a well-informed police personnel was a key entry point to the administration of juvenile justice in Ghana, hence, the coming of the project to improve greater access to juvenile justice and child protection services in the Upper West Region.

This, he noted, would ensure that children were properly protected by law either as offenders, victims or witnesses.

Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Mr. Benjamin Mensah, the Upper West Regional Coordinator of the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service lauded CDA for organising the training, saying a well-informed police officer discharges his/her duties diligently without any intimidation either in court or outside the court.