Criminal Justice
“Dual Punishment: Mothers in Nigerian Prisons and their Children”
The incarceration of women and the impact it has on children, families and the prisoner in terms of motherhood and parenting has become an increasingly prominent area of interest within the criminal justice and social welfare literature. Guided by attachment theory’s perspective on separation of mother from children, this current study explored the perceived unfulfilled parental tasks by incarcerated mothers; evaluated the care and support systems for nursing mothers in prison; examined the acce ...
“A Qualitative Exploration of the Coping Strategies of Female Offenders in Nigerian Prisons”
Deprivation and importation theories propose that the experience and adjustment of inmates to prison life is dependent on the restrictive prison milieu and their pre-prison experiences and orientation. This implies that prison’s sub-culture mediate the relationship between demographic characteristics and adjustment to prison life. Although this core assumption underlies both theories, few researchers have attempted to test its validity, while those that does have largely focused on male offender ...
“Elders in Prison: Their Health Status, Well-Being and Health-Promoting Behaviours in Nigerian Prisons”.
As prisons in Nigeria continue to witness ever growing number of aging women and men, concerns have been raised on the adequacy of the facilities in correctional institutions in the country to meet the support needs of the elderly inmates. Therefore, in order to advance knowledge on the well-being of elderly inmates in Nigeria’s correctional facilities, and as a way of supporting global empirical interests in the management of the elderly in corrections, this present study examined the capacity ...
Systematic Brutality, Torture and Abuse of Human Rights by the Nigerian Police: Accounts of Inmates of Ogun State Prisons
Nigeria is a country where serious cases of abuse of police authority and human rights infringements by security agents often stimulate intense public debate. Though there have been consistent denials by the leadership of the Nigerian Police on the use of torture-based interrogations to elicit information from arrestees, extant literature affirms that the police rely on different forms of torture as principal means of investigation. This paper appraised the recurrent problem of brutality and abu ...
‘One rule for the goose, one for the gander’? The use of Plea Bargaining for high profile Corruption Cases in Nigeria
Controversies have continued to trail the adoption and use of plea bargaining in the criminal justice administration in Nigeria, particularly in prosecuting high profile corruption cases. This paper interrogated the pros and cons of its application by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to recover looted funds from high profile corrupt public officials. Leaning heavily on sociological school, which emphasizes the relationship between law and the needs and institutions of the soci ...
Differential Treatments of Prison Inmates and Implications on Nigerian Criminal Justice System
In recent years, series of protests have broken out from various prisons across Nigeria as fallout of differential treatments of prisoners and poor condition of correctional facilities. Questions have been raised about the rationality of the disparate treatment of inmates along socioeconomic lines. This present study examined the reported segregation of inmates within the context of the correctional good of prison system. From the inductive analysis of 49 qualitative interviews with ex-inmates o ...
“Women’s Inhumanity Towards Women?” Treatment of Female Crime Suspects by Female Officers of the Nigerian Police
This article presents findings from a new qualitative study of female offenders’ interactions with Nigerian policewomen. Against the position of policing literature and feminists and gender advocates that abusive treatment of female arrestees is a function of policemen’s misconduct, this study exposes the active roles played by policewomen in inflicting violence on female detainees. We argue therefore that the mere increase in number and participation of policewomen in the criminal justice syste ...
“Crimes of the Crime Fighters”: Nigerian Police Officers’ Sexual and Physical Abuses against Female Arrestees
This article investigates incidences of the breach of human rights, constitutional provisions, criminal code, and police regulatory acts by Nigerian police officers in the course of arresting, detaining, and interrogating female suspects. A mixed-method approach was deployed to collect and analyze quantitative data from 186 female inmates, of which 27 inmates were interviewed, at the Female Maximum and Medium Security Prisons, Lagos. Findings indicate low compliance with the Anti-Torture Act and ...
Gender and Sentencing in the Nigerian Justice System: Are Women Given Preferential Treatments?
In contemporary criminology, gender differences in criminal court outcomes for women and men are almost axiomatic. The literature has offered significant data on the impact of gender on sentence severity. However, most of these studies have been based in the United States and other developed societies, while primarily focusing on the effect that offender characteristics have on sentencing outcomes. Drawing from the theoretical position of judicial paternalism, this present study, explored gender ...
Techniques and controversies in the Interrogation of Suspects by the Nigerian Police
This paper focuses on the reoccurring controversies that have trailed the techniques of Nigeria Police in investigating, interrogating and eliciting confessions from crime suspects in the country. Human rights organisations and other stakeholders have continued to report that “confessions” obtained from suspects through torture by the police are still admissible and used in courts as a basis for conviction. Drawing from Charles Tittle‟s Control Balance Theory, this study examined the perspective ...
Female Offenders as Victims of Gendered Violence by Officers of the Nigeria Police
In the mainstream media and sociological research, the issues of police brutality and use of force have remained prevalent. However, in spite of the appreciable attention given to police brutality against male citizens in international headlines and scholarly research, female victims have been relatively ignored. The aim of this paper is to explore the experience of female offenders with the police from the point of arrest through custody. Using a mixed-method research design, participants were ...
Pandemic policing and police sexual misconduct: voices of women sexually abused by COVID-19 enforcement officers
While global attention has been drawn to the reported spike in the rate of gender-based violence (GBV) occasioned by COVID-19 restrictions, there exists a clear gap in knowledge about incidences of GBV perpetrated by police officers in the course of enforcing COVID-19 laws. Drawing from the Nigerian experience, this qualitative study presents the accounts of 83 sexually victimized women. From the thematic analysis, their narratives of how COVID-19 lockdown facilitated their vulnerability to poli ...
On the ‘darkness of dark figure’ of sexual crimes: Survivors’ rape reporting experiences with the Nigerian police
While extensive studies have identified the influence of social perception and victims’ self-blame as factors responsible for underreporting of rape, fewer studies have explored victims’ interaction with police officers and possible impacts this could have on victims’ reporting behavior. Therefore, this study explores rape victims’ interaction with officers of the Nigerian Police in the course of seeking justice. Twenty-seven victims of rape who interacted with police and six key informants wo ...