The Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, has called on the Nigeria Correctional Service (NCoS) to spare no effort in ensuring that all escaped inmates are arrested and brought back into custody.
He made the call on Monday at the opening of a two-day retreat for senior management staff of the service in Sokoto State.
Aregbesola directed that as the officers deliberate, strategise, and set targets for the next five years, they must ensure the biodata of all inmates were harmonised with sister agencies, the Nigeria Financial Unit (NFIU), banks and the INTERPOL to track all escaped inmates.
“It is very important to have their (inmates) fingerprints, pictures, and other details you have with you to be harmonised with them,” he was quoted as saying in a statement by his media adviser, Sola Fasure.
The minister said the strategies and deliberations at the retreat should be centred around solutions for recapturing all escaped inmates to safeguard communities that may become prey to the criminal activities of escaped inmates.
“Retreats are for bonding, contemplating purpose and setting future goals, and a major issue that must be considered during this retreat is the decongestion of custodial facilities,” he added.
“One of the policies we quickly put in place then (during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic) was the decongestion programme under which thousands of inmates were released on compassionate ground.
“The follow-up to that is the consideration that we should find further ways to keep decongesting our facilities. We started work on the idea of compiling the list of convicted inmates serving light terms for not too serious offences, who were in custody because they could not pay their fines.”
Aregbesola commended the service for being able to manage the centres during the pandemic without recording a single infection.
He said the agency did a good job of keeping the virus away and must continue to keep the facilities safe and sound from inside and out.
The Controller General of NCoS, Haliru Nababa, in his remarks said the two-day retreat would not only afford the hierarchy of the agency the opportunity to restrategise and bond towards efficiency in service delivery but would also provide a clear perception of set targets.
He revealed that the current capacity of the 244 custodial facilities in the country stands at 58,278 as against the population of 75,000 inmates it now holds.
According to Nababa, this led to the congestion of the correctional centres, worsened by recent incessant attacks which were externally organised and executed.