By BENJAMIN UMUTEME -A new data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has revealed that Lagos prison was over populated by 3,469 inmates in 2016.
The Statistics Bureau in its Prison Statistics 2011-2016 revealed that the state recorded 7,396 prison inmates’ population as against a prison capacity of 3,927 in 2016. The state is closely followed by Rivers and Kwno state with 4,424 and 4,183 prison inmates.
Conversely, Ekiti and Bayelsa had the least prison inmates’ population of 444 and 585 as against prison capacity of 200 and 400 respectively.
In 2016 alone overall prison population in the country was 68,686 as against 65,033 in 2015.
According to NBS, the increase in prison inmates’ population for 2016 represents about 5.62 percent growth compared to the overall prison population in 2015.
The report revealed that prison admission by offence allegedly committed witnessed a drop to 142,848 in 2016 from 158,895 in 2013. Of that figure, stealing accounted for 47,702 followed by 27,384, 11,258,9754 and 83 for other offences, robbery, assault and human trafficking respectively with male accounting for 136,481 while female inmates were 6,367.
Furthermore, data on prison admission by type of imprisonment indicated that the number of inmates on Remand\awaiting trial dropped to 89,404 in 2016 from 93,849 in 2013. The same goes for inmates on short term and long term sentences which witnessed a drop in number from 40,215 in 2013 to 32,126 in 2016 and 24,352 in 2013 to 17,616 in 2016.
According to the report, inmates between the ages of 26-50 years accounting for 76,220 constitute majority of inmates’ population in Nigerian prison while 21,550 of them were between the ages of 21-25 years old.
