Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy
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Pretrial Detention
Measuring the Duration of Pretrial Detention in Nigeria
Nigeria has spent more than a decade trying to “decongest” its overcrowded prisons, using a mixture of amnesties and ad-hoc releases of inmates that have spent long periods of time in custody. Despite marked reductions in the total number of prison inmates in the first decade of this century, many prisons in the southern states of Nigeria, particularly those that house un-sentenced inmates, remain severely crowded, with people confined in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. In the summer of 2009, the Attorney General of Lagos State summoned experts to an inter-agency forum seeking fresh ideas and new measures to improve justice. Knowing that it would take a long time to introduce structural solutions to what he called “practices and procedures that foster delay in criminal trial,” he asked for help developing an indicator that could chart incremental progress in the short term.
In 2010, a team from the Attorney General’s office, the CLEEN Foundation, and Harvard began developing a measure of the duration of pretrial detention by studying the records of inmates that leave prison each month. These prison exit samples revealed that most inmates spend very short periods of time in detention, with one third of defendants leaving in less than one week, and another 29 percent leaving before the end of one month, as the chart below shows. The findings not only generated a reliable measure of the duration of detention, they also spawned the development of separate indicators for the Director of Public Prosecution and the Criminal Investigations Department of the State Police. To read about the results as well as the method by which these indicators were designed, read the report, Prison Exit Samples as a Tool of Indicator Development.
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Understanding Pretrial Detention in Sierra Leone
Many prison systems share similar features, but every prison has its own maladies.The Central Prison in Freetown, Sierra Leone, like its counterparts in Lagos, uses a simple population tracking device to record the number inmates each month according to their legal status. This register can help start the process of developing an indicator for pretrial detention by raising questions about the drivers of prison population dynamics. For example, as the chart below shows, the sudden and sharp reduction in the number of inmates on “remand” in July 2010 was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of inmates “under trial,” suggesting that factors other than case processing speed are responsible for the changes. Conversely, the annual decrease in the number of “convicted” inmates that follows a surge in the summer months did not occur in 2010, raising questions about changes in the length of sentences for convicted prisoners. Further research into these trends might catalyze the process of developing a reliable indicator for the problems of pretrial detention in Sierra Leone.
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