Govt failure to implement death penalty, cause of high crime rate 

Studied Common and Islamic law, Rashidat Mustapha was called to Bar in 2005, a graduate of University of Ilorin. For about three years she worked with R.O. Balogun to learn the rudiments of the law profession before becoming a state counsel.

Now as the Assistant Chief Legal Officer, Rashidat works with the Office of the Public Defender (OPD) under Kwara State Ministry of Justice. She talks  about the high rate of  crime in the country and other sundry issues, in this interview with ADETUNJI AYOBROWN. Excerpts; 

What do you think is responsible for such high crime rates in Nigeria?

Firstly, it is the failure of government to execute death sentences on those convicted by Supreme Court. Because most people that indulged in crimes always get away with the crimes, even when they are caught. After all had been said and done, many of these former inmates return to their old ways.

Even when some of them end up in prison, those with death sentences many of them later got pardoned and return to the society to recruit others to cause more havocs all because they have been in prison for long time and nothing being done to them.

But if just one execution is carried out publicly, such will serve as deterrent to other criminals that we have laws working in Nigeria. But because our governors are too corrupt, they are unwilling to sign any death warrants.

Secondly, Nigerian prisons themselves need total reformation in order to be suitable to cater for inmates. Most former inmates of our prisons come out worse than their previous lives. Nigeria prisons are not reforming anything in prisoners.

A good example I represented a case of a young man who had been in prison for about twenty years of his life. Upright he looks and acted, to the extent that he became their Imam in the prison.

He beguiled everyone, after the recommendation of his good conducts by prisons officials, he was pardoned.

But unfortunately, without spending his first month outside the walls, he was sent back. He went back to his old ways, because our correctional authority seems failing in its main duty.

Our prison should be a training and correctional centre. Government should train and engage the ex-inmates in order to make them useful to themselves and the society preventing them from going back to their old ways.

Thirdly, issues of broken homes and damaged relationships are another causes that are directly responsible for the high crime rates as it been witnessed in our society now. Youths are the leaders of tomorrow they say, but peer pressure and ill-exposure lead many youths to series of unimaginable acts of misbehaviour and crimes while in schools.

From robbery to rape, theft to stealing, cultism to gangsterism, a very big percentage of all cases we have handled are young people.