RE-THINKING IMPRISONMENT AS AN APPROACH TO SENTENCING UNDER THE NIGERIAN AND ETHIOPIAN SYSTEMS: LESSONS FROM THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

The imprisonment of offenders in prisons or correctional centres as an approach to punishment in the criminal justice system, especially for petty or minor offences, has been questioned across the world with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which calls for social distancing. The questions revolve around the sustainability of imprisonment as a preventive/deterrent approach in view of the fact that prisons or correctional centres have
become hubs of infections. This is largely due to the fact that in most African countries, there is a high level of congestion, inadequate institutional facilities/services and failure of the courts to effectively discharge their functions. In Nigeria and Ethiopia, for example, there are regulatory frameworks which encourage the use of community service sentencing and compulsory labour as alternative approaches to imprisonment. However, the extent of enforcement, effectiveness and adequacy of these regulatory frameworks in Nigeria and Ethiopia largely remain questionable. Using doctrinal and non-doctrinal methods, this paper critically investigates the effectiveness, adequacy and level of enforcement of community service sentencing and compulsory labour as alternative approaches to imprisonment in both jurisdictions with a view to exposing the flaws in both criminal justice regimes. This is inspired by the widely established flaws of imprisonment as a sentencing approach because of increasing global pandemics such as COVID-19. This paper reveals that the current state of the criminal justice system in Nigeria and Ethiopia is ineffective. The findings show that imprisonment, adopted as a major approach to punishment and sentencing, has not in any way reduced the rate of crimes. This imprisonment approach has also been revealed to be nonviable as the same cannot be sustained in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The overall
recommendations are calls for strengthening the community service sentencing in Nigeria and reform of the Ethiopian Criminal Code to include community service sentencing as a noncustodial measure in reducing prison congestion during outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.