Criminology & Penology: “Fight against crime, which way?”

KIANGIOSEKAZI WA NYOKA

I COULD not agree more to the answers and questions given to the Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Emanuel Nchimbi in response to Honourable Member of Parliament Leticia Nyerere that the solution to the rising rate of crime in this country could not be solved by constructing more prisons.

Rather, it should be solved by introducing appropriate rehabilitation programmes to offenders that are targeted in addressing their reoffending attitude. Winding his budget submission to the Parliament recently, Dr Nchimbi concurred with the views that effective intervention programmes to offenders is the right approach in dealing with the rising rate of crime in the country.

Such programmes, according to Leticia, are being practised in USA where prisoners are exposed to effective treatment programmes that are intended to addressing prisoner’s attitude against criminality. Crime is a problem and politicians are responsible to offer solutions for this problem.

If nothing else is offered, criminal law and the prison system may become the primary shield against crime and violators of human rights. Actually USA is not the best example of this approach but countries like Canada, Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, Australia are the world class leaders in this approach which is known as Case Management System based on Risk Assessment.

Africa too is on the verge of adopting this system as countries like Namibia and South Africa have already changed their Prisons laws to be compatible with this new approach which is essentially a scientific approach in dealing with offenders. I am upbeat with this change of mind-set of our political decision makers in coming up with these proposals and hopefully they  are eager to putting them into practice after the traditional way of “lock up them and throw the keys” has miserably failed.

How many times have we heard of the presidential reprieve to offenders and yet they go back to prisons? Dr Nchimbi had confirmed that recidivism rate in this country ranges between 30 to 33 per cent which by all standards is not acceptable; otherwise nothing works in prisons and the new Prisons Administration should look into this. The colonial approach on prisons was based on a philosophy of retribution, with a view that the punishment should be sufficiently enough for deterrent purposes.

Principally, the enforcement of that deterrence was based on confinement, general loss of liberty, hard labour and

inadequate rations. It was not surprising that penal diet was part of the prison’s punishments. The proclaimed emphasis post-independence on corrections was on rehabilitation without changing the basic approach on retribution justice.

Unfortunately up to the present day, our prison legislation upholds the phrase of penal diet with water adilibitum and there is very insignificant changes heralding the new dispensation. How could rehabilitation and social reintegration take place in this way?

Very unfortunately, the post-independence era for many African countries was encountered with several societal changes such as demographic problems, urbanisation, and industrialisation and to some extent landless communities.

All these are the socioeconomic challenges which have a bearing on the crime and overcrowding of African corrections that were wrongly perceived to be solved by the change of sentencing policies to many countries. Again all these were the wrong approaches of combating crime and reduction of recidivism.

Most of the prisons officials continued to enhance their military culture and lobbying to their governments to equate their ranks with those of military officials instead of sinking to their core function of rehabilitation of offenders. To them, making prisoners work in farms and workshop is more than rehabilitation and such offenders could be considered for parole or remission or presidential pardon without consideration of the psycho-social aspect of rehabilitation.

Practically recidivism is associated with serious crimes such as hold-ups, robbery with aggravating factors, and the kind of crimes which of late have been resurfacing in Dar es Salaam. It is not true that having a quiet spell of criminal activities is the results of the agility of the criminal justice system.

It is only a breathing space for criminals and that calls for combined efforts of ‘Police Jamii’ and Prisons and modernizing the rehabilitation process through Risk and Case Management System leading to gradual controlled release. Prisons are schools of crime and that the most dangerous criminals are those who are repeaters and therefore the approach should be to fight recidivism at any cost.

The question of fighting crime is the responsibility of everyone but at different levels. Citizens have a primary duty of fighting crime by working together with the police as informers or reporting any perceived criminal activity. Police and Judiciary have a secondary role in the fight of the crime as they are dealing with suspects who in most cases end up being free. At least 25% of the suspects are found guilty and end up in prisons.

Prisons plays a tertiary role in combating crime as these offenders going to prisons are no longer suspects but already proven guilty. Recidivists are the offenders whose ladder scale of committing crimes goes higher with the second and third crime progressively.

Prisons should critically look at this new role and work to fight recidivism by having effective treatment programmes that will act as a therapy to addressing the criminogenic needs of offenders. New relevant Prison Laws should be enacted to facilitate the new reforms that are necessary for addressing the offending attitudes of offenders. The new Prison’s primary duty is to contribute to the public safety as opposed to the former one of preventing prisoners from escaping.

Basic new things in this law should include the introduction of different kinds of gradual controlled conditional releases (parole), establishment, administration and control of Correctional and Community based facilities, new definitions of security levels and involvement of community in the whole process of conditional release. Let our decision makers come with one voice in this new researched way of combating crime through Case Management.

Source: Daily News (11/08/2012):http://www.dailynews.co.tz/index.php/columnists/columnists/8465-fight-against-crime-which-way