Recapture All Escaped Inmates, Aregbesola Orders NCoS

Nigeria Correctional Service (NCoS) has been told to spare no effort at ensuring that all inmates who escaped when the various facilities in the country came under attacks are arrested and brought back into custody, or leave innocent citizens as prey to hardened criminals.

The minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, made the call at the opening of a two-day retreat for senior management team of the service yesterday in Sokoto.

He urged the NCoS top brass to as matter of urgency, set target for the next five years, which must ensure capturing the bio-data of all inmates, which must be harmonised with sister agencies, the Nigeria Financial Unit (NFIU), all banks and the INTERPOL to track all escaped inmates.

The minister said, “It is also very important to have their fingerprints, pictures and other details you have with you to be harmonised with them.

“The truth is that for those on the run, they have nowhere to hide. Yes they can run, but they can’t hide. Fish them out.”

He specifically advised that the strategies and deliberations at the retreat be centred around solutions on recapturing all escaped inmates to safeguard communities who might become prey to criminal activities of such inmates.

This is even as Aregbesola did not fail to note with dismay, the negative impact of the #EndSARS protests which later turned violent, leading to attacks of custodial facilities which gave rise to the attacks on the facilities.

He said, “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 pointed that during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, “one of the policies we quickly put in place then 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.”

While commending the service for being able to manage the centres during the pandemic without recording a single infection, Aregbesola 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.

Meanwhile, the controller-general of the service, Haliru Nababa, said 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 hosts, leading to congestion of inmates.

He, however, revealed that measures that would forestall future attacks, such as the formation and activation of the Rapid Response Team (RRT) initiated more intelligence sharing with other security agencies were being installed.