Editorial (Daily Searchlight of Friday, 1st July 2022)
Stakeholders at a workshop on the need for an alternative sentencing regime have supported the call for community work sentencing for non-grievous or petty offenses.
They affirmed that community work sentencing for petty and first-time offenders did not only stop the production of hard care criminals due to contact with such groupings in the cells, saved the government monies on feeding such inmates, promoted reconciliation but also allowed such people to continue to use their skills and talents to support the development of their communities.
Nana Gyamfuaba, the Acting Queen Mother of the Shama Traditional Council at the Sensitization workshop organized by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiatives under the USAID Justice Sector Support activity described the call for community work sentencing as apt.
She noted that exposing first-time offenders to the harsh dictate of the law had in many ways aggravated crime rates and created unnecessary congestion in the prisons.
The Daily Searchlight supports the call by the proponents of the Alternative Sentencing Bill. We believe that it is a piece of very progressive legislation that can serve many development needs of the country.
First, it would serve to decongest Ghana’s prisons, which are now well over capacity.
Secondly, it would save the state money in terms of upkeep for the prisoners, which means that funds can be saved and invested elsewhere, for a better purpose.
Third, it would create a free labor pool for the State and the District assemblies, men and women who can be deployed for many necessary tasks.
Fourth, it would prevent the exposure of young and first offenders to hardened criminals. The importance of this cannot be emphasized enough. Many people go into prison as virtual neophytes, but come out as hardened deviants beyond all reform. It is a well-known fact that prisons often are the breeding beds of criminal gangs. Saving first and young offenders from such an environment would only create a safer society.
We hope that at the nearest opportunity, parliament would pass this Bill into law, to give judges greater leeway to save convicts who can be saved from a life of crime.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight on Friday, 1st July 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and iPDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
