Prisons’ decongestion, our mission – PRAWA official

A Kano-based legal practitioner working with Prisoners’ Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), a nongovernmental organisation, Barrister Katumi Mohammed Obare, has said that prisons’ decongestion had been the major preoccupation of PRAWA.
Addressing journalists yesterday in Kano, Obare said there were many prisoners on death row in various prisons that had spent years waiting for the governors’ signatures to be executed.
According to her, such a delay and other reasons have been partly responsible for the present congestion.
She said PRAWA “is a nongovernmental, non-profit organisation that is never receiving a single penny from any foreign organisation,” pointing out that the organisation was embarking on sensitisation via the media “with the aim of eliciting the prompt intervention of philanthropists and wealthy individuals to come in and support the decongestion drive.” Obare also said with philanthropists and wealthy individuals spear-heading the “gauntlet to free the inmates sentenced to various terms in prison from the bondage of continued incarceration,” prisons across the country would be reduced to their “initial capacities without necessarily being congested.” She called for “proper understanding by the public to engage the services of legal practitioners offering free legal services in situations” they felt obliged to do so, stressing that PRAWA was not “out to settle the fines slammed on inmates for offences they were convicted for, rather it is out to offer free legal services in collaboration with the Legal Aid Council.”