State Department for Correctional Services is emphatic on upscaling the vocational training as well as the formal education for inmates to ensure they go in line with the approach of their reformation and rehabilitation.
Principal Secretary (PS), Salome Beacco, said that the Department wants to plug in to the Training and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) value chain that is the vocational training industries to see how they can upscale the sector.
Beacco said some inmates are attending universities, while others are equipped with skills such as tailoring, welding and digitization so that once they complete their jail sentence, they can employ others and be independent.
She stressed that the government is ardent about the need to create more jobs and in the correctional sector, the Department is venturing into reviving various industries, to give more skills to the convicts.
She said the prison sector has a lot of industries in which inmates are involved, including tailoring, carpentry, welding and prison farms, where the Institutions can plant crops and rear animals.
“We are some of the best producers of furniture in this country and because a levy has been put in place to increase the cost of importing goods, we urge the public to support us since part of this income will go back to training our inmates in vocational training and ensuring that they get certificates, and they are NITA affiliated,” she said.
The PS was speaking in Mombasa during a familiarisation tour at Shimo la Tewa Maximum Security Prison, in which she stated she was in compliance with the President’s directive to inspect all the prison facilities, both the staff quarters and the prison quarters, in order to assess the needs of both staff and inmates.
“I am here to inspect ongoing projects as well as the stalled projects, assess the reasons as to why these projects are stalled and find out what can be done to improve the situation,” she said.
She said that on the tour she had an opportunity to interact with the inmates, whereby they gave her a memorandum of requirements, promising to look into them.
Some of the concerns presented, she mentioned, are the visitation rights that have already been revived and prison uniforms, which she said will be looked into.
“We have a very large clothing industry at Shimo la Tewa Maximum Prison and I have found that they are actually producing the uniform. They have so far produced 700 out of the targeted 900, we hope to continually increase that production,” she added.
The PS noted that plans are underway to revive livestock farming, assess how the farmlands are and see if they can increase the acreage of livestock in a bid to revive the leather factory, so as to provide shoes for themselves and sell to the public.
She promised to continuously look into staff motivation, starting with promotions, noting that the Department will keep addressing the welfare of staff and inmates.
She said the Department is also looking forward to increasing the number of wards and working with the National Commission on Administration of Justice to see more of the remandees attend court from outside so that the prisons are not crowded.
According to the PS, as informed by the County Commissioner (CC), the idea of an Alternative Justice System is very vibrant in Mombasa.
She noted that about 70 percent of the problems are resolved outside, with the involvement of the CC working together with the Probation Office.
“This is something we shall continually scale up so that we decongest, since I have established that the number of convicts serving their sentences is far less than those in remand,” she said.
On matters of land ownership, the PS said that a Taskforce has been formed and data collected on the number of land parcels with no title deeds. It is now engaging respective departments to get help getting title deeds for all prison lands.
By Chari Suche
