125 persons remanded at Nsawam prisons with expired warrants — Auditor- General’s Report

An audit sample conducted by the Auditor General in 2021 has revealed that warrants of 125 persons remanded at the male section of Nsawam Medium Security Prisons had expired.

This contrasts No. 171 of the Ghana Police Service Instructions, 2018, which requires expired commitment warrants of short sentence prisoners to be endorsed by station officers and forwarded to the Director General of Prisons for the warrants to be sent back to the Courts that issued them.

The Auditor General in the report, therefore, recommended a liaison between the Director-General of Prisons and the Ghana Police Service to work on the renewal of expired warrants or expedite action on such cases for final judgement.

As of June 2021, prisons in Ghana are reported to have been overcrowded by 3,247 inmates with the authorised prison population being 9,945.

Assistant Superintendent of Prisons (ASP) Stephen Okai Aboagye, a Senior Officer attached to the legal unit of the Ghana Prison Service, said overcrowding in prisons, which expired warrants were major contributors, had made it difficult to reform and segregate inmates “based on risk assessment.”

That, he said had led to contamination of inmates and a high rate of recidivism.

“We have a total prison population of 13,192. And out of this number, we have a total convict population of 11,638, and that represents 88.22 percent. We have a total remand population of 1,554, representing 11.78 percent,” he said at a Roundtable Discussion organised by the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) on the need for non-custodial sentencing.