Application of Queue Theory in Reduction of Prison Congestion (a Case Study of Nigeria Prison Service, Oke-kura, Ilorin)
Chapter One
AIM AND OBJECTIVES
The aim of this project is to apply queuing theory in improving prison services efficiency by working on how the theory can be incorporated in the relationship between the law court and prison waders. The objectives of the study are as follows;
- To help reduce prison congestion with the aid of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) through software application.
- To achieve quick reference to a data base for information needed easily and easy storage.
- To design a system, this will efficiently improve the prison services operation by ensuring that no prisoner waits beyond expected time.
- To enable quick planning and decision making on prisons reform.
- To design a system that will eliminate undue delay in criminal trials.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
REVIEW OF RELATED WORKS
The main aim of establishing the prison institution in all parts of the world including Nigeria is to provide a rehabilitation and correctional facility for those who have violated the rules and regulations of their society. However, the extent to which this maxim is true in practice has been a subject of controversy in a book titled “Challenges and Reforms in the Nigerian Prisons System” by Emeka E. O. (2011).
A casual observation of the population that goes in and out of the prisons in Nigeria presupposes that there are some problems in the system; hence the prisons system has not been able to live up to its expected role in Nigeria. Against this background, Emeka makes an argument on why reform is necessary in the Nigerian prisons. Some of these reasons include reforming the prisoners to be better than what they were before they were imprisoned, rehabilitate the prisoners in order to equip them with new skills or improve on their old ones, and seclude criminals from the rest of the society, pending when they have atoned for their “sins”.
The structural-functionalist approach of the system theory for the study of human society and culture as proposed by Radcliff-Brown of the British School of social anthropology and later developed by Meyer Fortes and Max Gluckman is utilized in explaining prison environment. (Obioha, 2011)
The Nigerian prisons have been enormously characterized by some problems, which several studies have indicated to be the reasons for the inadequacies of the system as a corrective institution. In various respects, life in Nigerian prisons in general is overly regimented to the extent that there is strict control in virtually all activities of the inmates. This often leaves the prisoners in a mentally brutalized manner with broken body and spirit, which destroys the individuals.
In this regard, it is apparent that the prisons system in Nigeria is faced with the problem of destroying the individual members of the community, which negates the essence of imprisonment, amounting to human development wastage in the national calculus. It is evident that various prisons in Nigeria are saddled with the problem of turning out maladjusted releases. Studies like Obioha (1995), Adetula et al. (2010) have shown that contact with the prison institution in Nigeria makes the less hardened individuals to be more hardened in criminal activities upon release, with more tendencies than not, to relapse to criminal activities, which generates high frequency of recidivism.
According to Adetula et al. (2010), the penal institutions subsystems; the justice, the police, prison yard and the operatives ways of administering justice is believed to bring about breeding and enhancing criminal behavior and recidivists than serving; deterrence, repentance, reformatory and reconciliatory attitudes between ex-convicts and people in free society to enhance confidence in physical and conceptual security.
FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH OVERCROWDING IN NIGERIAN PRISONS
The Nigerian prison population is a sort of “mixed grill” in the sense that it is made up of adult males and females, young persons, children, pregnant women, nursing mothers, criminal and civil lunatics, debtors, detainees, first offenders – that is, “star prisoners” and recidivists, long and short-term prisoners, condemned prisoners and inmates awaiting trial or being held for safe custody. These groups are not represented equally. (Kelly, 2002) Among these factors are:
Delay in the Administration of Justice
It is beyond doubt that when more than 60 percent of the total prison admissions are awaiting trial, the administration of criminal justice must be faulty. Kelly (2002) identified several factors as responsible for delay in the administration of criminal justice. First is the inadequacy of the courts and judicial personnel. It cannot be disputed that in Nigeria, the increase in population in some major cosmopolitan cities and growing small towns has not been met with corresponding increases in the number or size of court buildings. Also, the remuneration offered to those on the bench is poor, which has made it difficult to attract competent judicial officers. The performance of some of them leaves a lot to be desired.
Some are lazy, while others are not committed, and cases are adjourned at the slightest excuse. In addition, legal practitioners frequently go to court unprepared. They manufacture all sorts of reasons why adjournment should be granted, and some are just simply incompetent. The preliminary investigation and the Assize system are contributing factors also. These are colonial “hold-overs”, which remain in some states. The system of handling all criminal cases at one particular time of the year usually leads to a situation in which cases that do not fall within the period are not handled, and a consequent backlog of cases is left pending.
Additional problems stem from grossly inadequate equipment in some states. For example, in some cases of dangerous driving in which death occurred, it took six months or more for the compilation of the “case diary” because of shortages of typewriters and typists at police stations. Thus, cases expected to take three months take eighteen months on the average. In forgery cases, because there are few handwriting experts serving in the northern states, it takes about six months to get them to give evidence.
Over-Criminalization
It is not unlikely that there has been an increase in criminal activity, which has contributed to the “overcrowding” in Nigerian prisons, especially now that the rewards have become so conspicuous in the opulence enjoyed by white-collar criminals and “drug barons”. In the absence of accurate data, such a rise in criminal activity is a reasonable assumption. It likely is related to the deteriorating economic situation.
CHAPTER THREE
PROJECT METHODOLOGY
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Main sources of information for this study are secondary materials which include journals and official bulletin of the government.
Research materials such as textbooks, journals, literatures and internet resources were consulted in an attempt to gather related information for a more detailed literature review to aid in a successful design and implementation of the proposed social networking system.
ANALYSIS OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM
In the existing system, the manual approach of keeping prisoners’ record, files containing prisoner`s record are stored in the cabinet in which references are made to them when the need arises.
The information about prisoners are entered by the officers in charge of keeping such records and can later be put together and stored in the cabinet. The information consist of prisoners name, address, age, sex, nature of crime committed, state of origin, nationality, and the day the crime was committed.
Addition to this is the periodic analysis of prisoners population involves making reference to all the day to day record keeping of the prisoners, while the analysis is based on the monthly breakdown. Also, if information is required being peculiar to a certain prisoner, a reference has to be made to a file that contains the record of that prisoner. By doing such, the operation is said to be tedious and time consuming for the prison officer to perform.
Having discussed how the existing system works, it can be seen that some certain problems are bound to be discovered, such problems are itemized in the next session.
CHAPTER FOUR
DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND DOCUMENTATION OF THE SYSTEM
SYSTEM DESIGN
Design is a way of mapping and arranging part into a whole, which satisfies the objective involve. The system design gives details of the output design, input design, database design and procedure design, which are the component subsystems, that makeup the application as a unit.
OUTPUT DESIGN
Output design is the section that gives description of the output media and the expected output interface for the proposed application for queue theory in reduction of prison congestion.
The output media for providing required information as defined in the application are the visual display unit – VDU (Monitor Screen) and the printer. The VDU is used to display the information that is to be view in soft copy from the application while the printer produces hardcopy – paper copy – of the information required. The respective output interface designs in the application are as follows:
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
SUMMARY
This project had given a background on prison system in Nigeria, including the problems, reform processes and the extent of their effectiveness. From what have been discussed in the paper, the problems in the prison system in Nigeria are not new, especially with regard to overcrowding and congestion, which date back to the period of colonialism. In this regard, all efforts in form of reforms to better the living standard in the prisons and reposition it to contribute to national development should be more articulate and serious. Various dehumanizing nature in the prisons and lack of rehabilitation facilities makes the system to be incapable of refining its inmates.
Ideally, the prison should serve every society as a reformatory, but only when the necessary things are in place, if not, the whole process will amount to wastage of human resources. In Nigeria, because the prison system does not have the capacity to rehabilitate, it contributes very little or nothing to the development efforts in the country.
This paper review models to ease the operation and the collection of prisoner register and report to yield an effective management of a prison. It will help to combat the problem encountered in the manual system being used presently. Also, it emphasized the possibility of applying computer to solve the problems of the prison services arising from inefficiency and attitudes of prison officers.
EXPERIENCE GAINED
With this research work, it made me realized that the manual system used by the prison management is not effective thus there is no proper record keeping.
More so, I now have a deeper insight as to how some of the prison management application is designed and developed. It has served as a means of familiarity in the field and also improved my programming skills in Visual Basic application.
RECOMMENDATION
This project work has been implemented towards the management of prisoner`s record. Several findings have been carried out on the operation of the existing system in which there are still some limitations to the design of the proposed system. For further works as regards to this project topic, it is recommended that the picture of all prisoners should be included as part of their records; In addition, a facility to update the record of all prisoners should be improved as well.
CONCLUSION
The Prison is a strategic institution for Nation building and security. As long as the society subsists, people will always commit crimes; be found guilty and sent to prison. In prison, such persons are supposed to come to terms with what they did as they embrace opportunities for change offered by Prison programmes. When we come together in fora like this, some persons proffer ideas that create the impression that we have come to reinvent the wheel.
One sure way of ensuring that this works is to put in place mechanisms for quick and fair dispensation of justice which sees to it that the innocent are released while the guilty are imprisoned. The establishment of such a mechanism should be the concern of the present drive for Prison and indeed justice sector reforms. To keep people in custody and discharge them after a long stay is a travesty of justice. To hinge justice reforms on decongesting the prison is very short-sighted because the issue of crime and its treatment has not been addressed.
If in other African States, accused persons can get justice within an accepted, short time frame, why is it so difficult for Nigeria to attain such a level? Why do we have to go round promoting programmes that amount to shooting ourselves in the leg? There really is no alternative to having a vibrant Criminal Justice System that can face up to Criminal acts in the land and deal with them according to law.
REFERENCES
- Adetula G. A., Adetula A., Fatusin A. F. 2010. The prison subsystem culture: Its attitudinal effects on operatives, convicts and the free society. Ife.
- Biju M. K., Naeema K. and Faisal U. (2011). Application of Queuing Theory in Human Resource Management in Health Care. Kannur University, Thalasseri.
- Bose S. J., (2002) Chapter 1 – An Introduction to Queuing Systems, Kluwer/Plenum Publishers, London.
- Dr. Philip (1995). “The Nigerian Prison System; Social History”, Chucks Printer, Edo.
- Engr. Normal. L. (1998). “Management Standard for Developing Information System”, Wimbling Printing press, London.
- Flood, J. E. (2010) Telecommunications Switching, Traffic and Networks, Chapter 4: Telecommunications Traffic, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1998.
- Goffman E., (1961). Asylums. New York: Garden City Anchor Books.
- Kelly F. P. (2002). Networks of Queues with Customers of Different Types Journal of Applied Probability, Vol. 12, No. 3.
- Lawrence W. Dowdy, Virgilio A.F. Almeida, Daniel A. Menasce (2004). “Performance by Design: Computer Capacity Planning By Example”. http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~menasce/perfbyd/
- Mayhew, Les; Smith, David (2006). Using queuing theory to analyse completion times in accident and emergency departments in the light of the Government 4-hour target. Cass Business School. http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/media/stories/story_96_105659_69284.html.
- Obioha E. E. (1995). Prison Culture in Nigeria; A Study of Life Within Agodi Prison Community, Ibadan. M.Sc Dissertation, Unpublished. Ibadan: Department of Sociology, University of Ibadan.
