Home Affairs permanent secretary Ludeki Chweya views prisons as institutions that punish the poor. He said as much at a workshop on child offenders in Nairobi.
The PS believes courts are no cure for social problems like poverty. “There is no need to take a poor person to court when you know they will not get justice.
“That is purely punitive, because they cannot afford legal counsel,” he told participants at the Lenana Mount hotel in Nairobi, adding that penal institutions are full of people who should be out if only they could afford the fines.
“How do you ask a jobless person to pay a Sh5,000 fine?” he wondered. To check out Dr Chweya’s claims, Saturday Nation did an investigation, which confirmed that vis-à-vis the rich, jails do indeed punish the poor disproportionately.
Interviews with former prisoners, organisations and Prisons officials confirmed that poverty was the main cause of people’s incarceration, be they in remand or serving jail sentences.
In some cases, they may not even have committed any crime to land them in prison. Our interviews confirmed that selective punishment of poor people led to recidivism, whereby freed inmates became jailbirds shunting in an out of prisons.
Vis-à-vis congestion in our jails, and the fact that half of the prisons’ population are petty offenders, the implications of failing to stem recidivism are enormous.
The Prisons director of programmes in charge of rehabilitation, Ms Mary Khaemba, says that Kenya’s 94 penal institutions currently host 53,000 inmates — twice as many as they should.
But Brother Linus Schoutsen, the coordinator of Fr Grol’s Welfare Projects in Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate says the jails have 300 per cent more inmates than they should.
Kamiti, for instance, was meant for 800 prisoners, yet it usually has 2,800 to 3,000 — almost 400 per cent of its capacity, Bro Linus notes. “The number keeps on increasing.”
Frequent cholera epidemics, typical of crowded conditions, typify our prisons. In May, for instance, a prisoner died and 61 others were admitted to hospital following a cholera outbreak at the Shimo la Tewa jail.
A week later, an undisclosed number of prisoners in Bungoma were treated for cholera at the local district hospital. While many inmates are serving sentences for their crimes, many others are victims of trumped up charges.
They are in jail because they have no means to bail themselves out pending hearing of their cases, and they cannot afford lawyers to defend them in court.
The typical prisoner is the jailbird caught in a vicious cycle of ‘survival crimes’. Unlike serious offences such as rape, murder and robbery with violence, which call for custodial sentences, the best cure for petty crime is tackling its cause — poverty.
“The money I get from the sale of the brew helps me to buy food and pay school fees for my daughters and sons. I also pay house rent,” the widow in Kirinyaga, who is a regular visitor to the law courts for brewing and selling the local makabo , told the Nation.
Prisons and other agencies working with inmates are unanimous that recidivism is rife among petty offenders. Ms Khaemba, who says the ratio of petty offenders to serious criminals’ is ‘half-half’, links high recidivism to short-term offenders, mostly hawkers, illicit brewers, bhang peddlers and petty thieves — “and prostitutes”, adds Mr Johnson Maundu, the administrator of Fr Grol’s Welfare Projects.
Petty offenders need to feed and educate their children, Ms Khaemba points out. “Unless you give them an alternative source of income, they will always come back (to jail).” But Saturday Nation interviewed two former prisoners, whose cases show that unlike Chepkorir, another type of prisoner is in jail on false charges, but is too poor to buy his way out.
Take the case of Mr Wycliffe Amaya (aka Baba Ngata). In January, 2007, the Korogocho resident who worked as a guard at Eastleigh’s Ushirika flats got into trouble when an alternator and a car starter were stolen from a matatu parked at his workplace.
Without investigating the theft, the police arrested Mr Amaya and three co-workers and locked them up in Nairobi’s Industrial Area remand home. With no evidence except that the compound he guarded was the scene of crime, police charged him and the other guards with the crime of stealing motor vehicle spare parts.
Suddenly, the father of five was staring a three-year jail sentence in the face over an offence he avers he never committed. He told Saturday Nation : “We were guarding the matatu, but we were not aware of the contents.” Apart from not fully understanding the criminal process, he had no lawyer to represent him in court.
It took the intervention of the International Justice Mission (IJM) that had another client in a similar situation in the same jail for him to be freed 10 months later.
That his accuser was taking advantage of Baba Ngata’s poverty and inability to defend himself was evident in that as soon as the IJM came on board, he stopped attending court, although he had earlier insisted on having his spare parts back before he could end the case.
The complainant’s disappearance enabled IJM to press for the case’s dismissal. Aware that poverty was the reason for Mr Amaya’s 10-month lock-up, the IJM helped reintegrate him back in society by buying him a mkokoteni (handcart) of his own.
Before remand, Baba Ngata used to hire mkokoteni to supplement his meagre guard’s pay. Duncan Mtongi Muhindi, 29, was with Baba Ngata in remand. He had been in jail for six months when Wycliffe joined him at the Industrial Area Remand jail.
Like Wycliffe, he was a watchman when a car was stolen. “When I reported, I was held for being the thief,” he told Saturday Nation. An old man he was working with tipped him off on the IJM, whom he told what had exactly happened. “They came to the remand prison and said they would help me; they were my advocates.”
With the help of the IJM, who did thorough investigations and defended Muhindi in court, the ex-prisoner, who would otherwise have lingered in jail indefinitely, was found innocent and released. The case of Muhindi confirms Mr Chweya’s claim — that their poverty and inability to hire lawyers is the main reason why most people end up in jail.
Another similarity with Baba Ngata’s case is that once his accusers realised that he had defence, they stopped attending court. “Even the complainant never came to court to confirm my guilt. The soldier who used to come to court had never done the investigations,” Muhindi told the Saturday Nation.
The prisoner’s lot is tough. “We had breakfast at 7am. It was usually uncooked uji (porridge) in a dirty mkebe (tin can). “Lunch was at 9am; it was ugali that was cooked the previous day or the day before. Sleeping was a problem, lice are many.
And to cap it call, the Chrisco church faithful said sale of drugs was rife — something he found hard to cope with. Bribery of warders, he said, drove the trade in drugs. Non-compliant inmates “are beaten by warders indiscriminately”.
The worst thing about remand is that unlike convicted prisoners, who have clear work schedules, they are expected to just sit or sleep throughout. Because of his Christian orientation and mobilising fellow remand prisoners in prayer, Muhindi earned the nickname “Mhubiri ” (preacher).
“When I was arrested, I knew I had no one but God (to count on)” he said. “I felt my life was finished. How did he muster the courage to mobilise fellow inmates in praise and worship?
“I found people in remand who used to sing at night; when they left, I felt I should take over; so I showed them especially those who did not know God that there was hope. Muhindi was in remand one year and three months — from March 2006 to June 2007 June.
