Key stakeholders in Nigeria's justice and correctional sectors have intensified calls for comprehensive reforms aimed at restoring dignity to inmates while strengthening mental health support and rehabilitation structures across the nation's correctional facilities.
National Dialogue on Correctional Reform
This renewed push emerged during the 2025 Seminar Series of the Shamies Unusual Heart Foundation (SUHF) held in Abuja, which gathered policymakers, security agencies, justice sector actors, development partners, academics, and civil society organizations. The high-level forum centered on the theme "Restoring Dignity and Reducing Recidivism: Education, Partnerships, and Innovation in Nigeria's Correctional System."
Ebenezer Akarah, Executive Director of SUHF, revealed that the foundation's programs specifically target recidivism reduction by enhancing inmates' mental health, education, and access to opportunities both within and outside correctional walls. He acknowledged the Nigerian Correctional Service for demonstrating notable improvements in rehabilitation efforts, inmate education, and institutional support in recent years.
Mental Health and Technology Initiatives
Akarah emphasized that mental health represents a critical gap in Nigeria's correctional system, prompting SUHF to focus extensively on this area since 2019. "One major issue is mental health. Our correctional system gives little attention to that area, so our foundation has focused there since 2019. We've seen great improvements," he stated.
The foundation's innovative approach included establishing technology hubs in both Suleja and Kuje Correctional Centres during 2024, providing inmates with digital learning opportunities and formal education access while incarcerated. Akarah described the seminar as an annual platform designed to drive national conversation about systemic gaps undermining inmate education, mental health, reintegration, and human rights protection.
"Mental health is important because talents exist even inside prison. People inside have higher expectations from society once they leave, yet society often stigmatizes them," Akarah noted, adding that "going behind bars doesn't make anyone less human."
Partnerships and Professional Insights
The event featured the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between SUHF and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), establishing a long-term collaboration focused on prison welfare monitoring and rights-based interventions.
Professor Aishatu Yusha'u Armiyau, Medical Director of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Kaduna, warned that mental health challenges within correctional facilities remain severely underestimated. Representing the Nigerian Medical Association President, she explained that many inmates enter correctional centers already struggling with mental health concerns, while others develop conditions due to isolation, trauma, or inadequate family support.
"Almost everyone there has a behavioural issue. Behaviour led them there. Many do not have mental illness but have emotional and psychological strain," observed Armiyau, who brings a decade of experience working in correctional facilities. She advocated for complete integration of psychiatric, emotional, and psychological support into daily correctional management practices.
Magistrate Farida Ibrahim of the FCT Judiciary emphasized that correctional reforms must prioritize rehabilitation, education, and partnerships to build safer communities. "A theme not only timely but crucial—because justice that punishes without transforming prepares people to return, not reform," she asserted.
She elaborated that education equips inmates with critical thinking and employable skills, partnerships strengthen support systems beyond confinement, and proper reintegration helps prevent reoffending driven by exclusion or frustration. Magistrate Ibrahim urged all stakeholders to implement the seminar's outcomes beyond the event venue, committing to "a correctional system that is humane, not dehumanizing; restorative, not vindictive; transformative, not wasteful; and reintegrative, not isolating."
