Expedite Community Service Sentencing Bill – CSOs charge gov’t
The Ghana Prisons Service estimates close to 13,485 people in jail in 2021.
Consequently, some Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are urging the government to pass the Community Service Sentencing Bill into law quickly to decongest the prisons.
Community sentence or alternative sentencing or non-custodial sentence allows a court to punish an offender in different ways other than serving a jail term.
The absence of a non-custodial sentencing law means that every breach of the law lands the offender in jail.
Speaking at a sensitisation workshop for the media in Accra on Thursday, 10 March 2022, the Director of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Ms Mina Mensah, bemoaned the inhumane conditions in Ghana’s prison.
She argued that with the passage of the bill, judges would have an alternative sentencing regime to punish petty offenders without not necessarily putting them behind bars.
“As of now, every offence takes you to jail because there is no alternative regime, but empirical evidence has shown that imprisonment does not necessarily reduce crime,” she emphasised.
Ms Mensah stressed the need for the passage of the bill to create room for petty offenders to be used for developmental activities instead of throwing them into prisons.
On his part, the Director of Programs at the Institute of Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, Edmund Amarkwei-Foli, said the objective for pushing for the passage of the community sentencing regime is not to encourage deviant behaviour but to reduce the prison population, discourage petty offences and improve on justice delivery.
“There is the need to sensitise, educate and popularise community sentencing regime to improve on our criminal justice delivery,” he stated.
According to data from the Ghana Prisons Service, 67 per cent of prisoners are extremely overcrowded, with the number of inmates above 150-300 per cent of their holding capacity.
Background
Ghana’s authorised prison capacity is 9,945. However, the prison’s inmate population in 2020 was 15,528, representing 52% overcrowding capacity.
The overcrowding of Ghana prisons constitutes a significant problem that confronts its criminal justice system. Ghana’s current criminal justice policy, which historically was fashioned on the British legal system, focuses more on punitive or retributive or ‘punishment fits the crime’ rather than on a rehabilitative approach.
The criminal justice delivery system in Ghana is mostly based on prison sentencing because the statutory provisions (The Criminal and Other Offenses (Procedure) Act, 1960 (Act 30) limit judges to impose jail terms for all types of offences. This practice has caused more harm than good as it has become detrimental to prisoners’ well-being, especially minor offenders, rather than reformative.
The reliance on custodial sentencing in Ghana has resulted in overcrowded prisons breeding more recidivists than reformed persons.
To push for the passage of the Community Sentencing bill, CHRI has partnered with other Civil Society organisations like Crime Check Foundation, Legal Resource Center, Amnesty International, CDD-Ghana and many others.