My name is Umar Abdulkadir Idris, 400 Level student and a bona fide clinician, Faculty of Law, Nasarawa State University Keffi. My personal reflection will be based on the pretrial detainee project. When I learnt of this project, I was very much obliged, I felt that it is an opportunity for me to visit the prisons. This is because I had never been to any prison in my life. I was assigned to a team that is to visit the keffi prison to carry out interview on inmates. We waited aside as demanded - as the prison' wardens called some of the inmates for the interview page by page.
My sincere notion on the Nigerian justice system is that prisons are meant to serve as a corrective centre for state offenders or better still reformation to prisoners, but the case in keffi prison is in the opposite.
In Comparison to the Western world, although I never had the opportunity to observe any before now, but I have had the privilege to watch TV series on how their prison operates - it looks conducive and ideal for human habitation and not as the one I personally witnessed in keffi; the Keffi prison where inmates are treated with disdain. We got to know in the process that some of these prisoners do not even know exactly why they were arrested and detained with great difficulty on their part to communicate their families. Some of the inmates have been imprisoned for so long as a result of minor offences, which ought to have abated long ago that they committed. This is not less to lack of legal representation. The prison officials still hold them in the prison custody and more importantly some of these prisoners do not even have a case file to start with. That was when I realised that everything is wrong about our justice system. I always ask myself, why the rights of human beings are violated day by day with no outstanding effort to curb it.
This made me to be abreast with latest happenings in our judicial system and it also gives me the inspiration and motivation to become a better individual and be more serious with the task at hand because justice is the last hope for some of this prisoners. Therefore, if we do not help some of these inmates with the little way we can afford, no one will and they will continue to suffer and live an undeserving and undesirable life, away from their families and friends.
After all of this, I realised that the major problem we are encountering in this country is the attitude of some of our security agencies, most especially the "SARS" who used to intimidate and arrest the innocent citizens without proper investigation. Therefore, some of these security agents need to be cautioned on their attitudes towards the innocent citizens in order to avoid judicial rascality.
Notwithstanding, I sincerely thank the God Almighty for giving me the opportunity to be part of the Law Clinic. Also I thank (NSUKLAW CLINIC) for giving me the opportunity to partake in the pretrial detention project and I pray for much and better opportunity beyond expectation.
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