The African Prisoner’s Welfare Program is a non-profit organisation set up to work with the society and alongside the prison system to ensure that all offenders are given a fair and speedy trial, rehabilitated and not denied of their basic civil rights. The prisons are filled with inmates whom are awaiting trial as a result of charges that are yet to be filed against them and have in the interim b
een imprisoned for years. Some of these prisoners are innocent and thus undeserving of incarceration, some of them are guilty and maybe deserving of the level of punishment they receive, and some are guilty but of crimes of a lesser nature that should be punishable by a fine or community service. As a result of this, the prisons are over populated and inhabitable so what then happens when you house all of these offenders in such an environment? It becomes a dog eat dog world and in a bid to as much as survive the ordeal, each individual becomes even more aggressive than they were prior to incarceration. The state of African prisons today are so bad that incarcerating these so called offenders has become more of a punitive action than a rehabilitative one. The main aim of incarceration should be rehabilitative and not punitive. By making incarceration punitive we are denying the offenders of their basic civil rights as human beings and by so doing, we strip them of what little humanity they may have left in them. In essence what we are then doing is simply recycling offenders and sending them back out into the society worse off than they were when they went in. They end up becoming repeat offenders and a major threat to themselves, the wardens and staff in the prisons but most of all to the society as a whole. The African Prisoner’s Welfare Program has been set up to work with volunteers and alongside the legal and prison system to ensure that all offenders are given a fair and speedy trial, rehabilitated as opposed to punished and whilst we do not condone their behaviour and despite their offences not denied of their basic civil rights.
