Judging from the pages of the Performance Audit Report on the welfare being provided to inmates by the Sierra Leone Correction Service, December 2021, that laid bare the institutional odds and its effects on the general well-being of inmates, it is but fitting that the attention of the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission is urgently drawn to the Report, especially so when the Fifth Parliament of the Second Republic vehemently refused to debate the Report.
Findings have it that the main thing that stimulated the country’s supreme audit institution Audit Service Sierra Leone to conduct such an audit cannot be unconnected to the hooping sum that the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) doles out to the Sierra Leone Correctional Service for the implementation of reforms project from Prisons to Corrections Centres in 2016.
Justification then, for the release of the UNDP funding for the said project, was to primarily enable the Sierra Leone Correction Service to provide durable solutions in the areas of overcrowding resulting to congestion of cells, poor medical facilities, insufficient beddings, inadequate uniforms for inmates, lack of correctional facilities and ineffective reintegration and rehabilitation of inmates.
Since 2016 to date, annual audit reports combined with both local and international Organizations reports on the monitoring of suspects in detention cells and convicted criminals in remand has and continues to wonder as to why the said whooping sum failed to bring the long-awaited result.
Despite the UNDP funding for the implementation from prisons to corrections, the Forum Newspaper SL is in the possession of documentary evidence of another SLCS-UNDP project tittle “Provision of Support Through Earning Scheme” for inmates that will be made public for the attention and consumption of all and sundry.
Despite the quarterly government subventions over the years, the Forum stands quit knowledgeable about SLCS sources of other funding windows, that if properly managed will would have long before now change the physical conditions of inmates in correctional cells country over. The prison infrastructure remains outdated, overcrowded, lacks ventilation and sanitary facilities. Medical facilities remain substandard, resulting in poor health conditions and inmates lack sufficient nutritious food and water.
Despite support from government and other donor partners in transforming the Sierra Leone Correctional Service (SLCS), the welfare of inmates is still being compromised. Since the performance audit report came out, the Forum Newspaper, through SLCS.
Public Relations Department has requested time without number for an interview with the Director General on the supreme audit institution recommendations.
