•Inmates’ degree feats at NOUN reinforces the correctional as more reformative than punitive
The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) just set record — 51 inmates, from Nigeria’s correctional facilities, just graduated from the university: 41 with first degrees; another 10 with post-graduate degrees.
This NOUN-Nigerian Correctional Services (NCS) collaboration, to make convicts better citizens after serving their terms, must be hailed by all. But now is the time to put in place a robust ex-convict rehabilitation policy.
These prisoners-turned-graduates should be fully aided by a doughty social support system, after they have finished serving their terms. After surviving the crucible of academics, even within the strictures of a correctional, they should be helped to escape the post-correctional stigma that is the harsh reality of ex-convicts.
Still, first thing first: whatever the NCS is doing to draw its inmates’ attraction to scholarship, is good. It should continue with it. No only that, it should expand such policies, so that many more knowledge-driven inmates can take full advantage.
It should also improve study atmosphere at its centres, so much so that it could start breeding a coterie of model inmates, which it can showcase to prove correctional sentences are no end to a life with purpose.
With such modelling, the NCS can begin a practical campaign based on what on the surface looks like a paradox but is really the very fundament of the correctional as a reformative centre: hate the crime but love the criminal.
A sentence for a crime committed is societal sanction hard — even if well-deserved –enough. Being sent to a correctional is a logical follow-up. But that follow-up should lay more stress on de-blighting those lives, rather than grinding them the more in the harsh sand of infamy. The society can only be better for it.
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We must also thank NOUN, which has come out with a model to make our inmates tap into the guiding lights of higher education. The results it is producing so far clearly show we just might have some decent human resource trapped in lawful captivity. The country loses nothing by putting in place a system that can tap into these captive resources after having served their terms.
Indeed, NOUN is so reminiscent of the Plato Allegory of the Cave — an allegory of a mind shackled to pit-dark ignorance at the bottom of a cave. Then, came the first thrust of knowledge: the naked lamp. After, came electricity. But the ultimate, in the final release for debilitating ignorance, is the sparking majesty of daylight!
Applied to correctional services, sentencing could make the shackling to the cave. Progressive learning, to make a better citizen, begins the ultimate release from past misdeeds. It’s a viable way to national development, via citizen improvement. The concept of the correctional should be interpreted as the state equivalent of tough love — by which a parent applies a sanction, out of love to correct, not out of cruelty to maul.
Still, this exposure to higher education should only be the start of improving every level of inmate lives. Not every inmate has an inclination to study. But every inmate desires better treatment and respect for his or her humanity. But inmates modelling better lives, even within correctional walls, help.
Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little; later: el-Hajj Malik el- Shabazz, after his conversion to Islam after what he considered shocking American/Christian/White hypocrisy of his day) but always Malcolm X (even long after his assassination in 1965: he lived from May 19, 1925 to February 21, 1965) was famous case of prison reformation.
He got thrown into the can for larceny and burglary. In his thunderous anger against the negro hopelessness of his racist, native America, “X” represented his craving for his true African identity. “X”, in America, was just a glorified nobody.
But he left prison, if not less angry, then in better ways to channel his anger. That was because of the learning he had acquired in prison. He entered as a virtual bum. He left as an intellectual in his own right, though a radical intellectual that gave the establishment such a fright, it was forced to deal with his more pacifist contemporary, the Revd. Martin Luther-King — who too, ironically, fell to the assassin’s bullet.
Reserved society would prefer a Luther-King to a stormy petrel as Malcolm X. Witness the Luther-King public holiday in the United States. Yet, prison self-education bred a better version of Malcolm. His campaign, though unorthodox, also helped to force concession for Black rights
The summary is that an improved mind does no one no harm. That’s the post-correctional direction both NCS and NOUN plot. It should be lauded and embraced by everyone.
