Group advocates for access to qualitative healthcare for all inmates

The Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE-Nigeria) has advocated for access to qualitative healthcare for all inmates in all prisons in the country.
The Executive Director of CURE-Nigeria, Mr Sylvester Uhaa, made the call in a news briefing held in Enugu on Thursday.
Uhaa noted that inmates nationwide should be treated free-of-charge; adding that denial of treatment to inmates due to lack of money had heightened ill-health and death among prison inmates nationwide.
Access to healthcare in prison across the country remain critically inadequate, resulting in the deaths of over 900 inmates nation-wide in 2016, with 32 in one prison in Lagos State alone.We want to remind Nigeria Prison Service (NPS) that access to health care for people in prison is a right that is well protected in international law.
We call on the Federal Government to take immediate and progressive steps to provide people in prison with quality access to healthcare to prevent avoidable deaths.Specifically, we ask President Muhammadu Buhari to direct the Minister of Health to ask all public hospitals to treat inmates without asking for payments to deal with the situation where prison staffs have to contribute money to take inmates to hospitals,’’ he said.
According to him, the state governments, where these prisons are domiciled, should also help the Federal Government in this direction.
Uhaa also called on the Nigeria Prison Service to stop detaining mentally-ill persons in prison custody rather they should be taken to psychiatric hospitals for adequate and holistic medical attention.
He said that in spite of the provisions of the Mandela Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners that mentally-ill persons should not be admitted into prison, Nigeria had continued to detain lunatics in prisons.
Recent statistics show that there are 76 of them in Aba Prison, 12 in Sokoto Prison, and 57 males and 2 females in Enugu Prison.There are others in other prisons and detention centres across the country, including NDLEA detention centers.
“These people are unfit to stand trial and therefore one wonders what they are doing in detention,’’ he said.
According to him, we ask the Federal Government to direct the Nigeria Prisons Service and other law enforcement holding lunatics in their cells to begin the transfer of these people to health centers for treatment and rehabilitation without delay.