Procedural Justice and Fairness in Cases Adjudicated and Attitudes to Recidivism among Nigerian Prisoners
Purpose:
The study critically examines procedural justice and fairness in court processes, the Nigerian prison system, term of imprisonment, and prisoners’ perception of treatment effects on their attitude to recidivism behaviour practice in the Nigerian socio-cultural context. The aim is to measure the relationship between cases adjudicated, imprisonment term, length of sentence, crime committed, court fairness and recidivism attitude.
Design/Methods/Approach:
The study adopts an ex-post facto design approach for the survey. Three hundred prisoners from the Olokuta and Owo prisons in Ondo State, Nigeria were randomly selected as participants. Questionnaires and oral interview questions were adapted to elicit data. Pearson product moment correlation statistical analysis was used to process the data.
Findings:
The results show that the six measurement variables correlated at different levels of significance and directions with the object being measured – recidivism attitude.
Research Limitations / Implications:
Access to prison and soliciting the data from the required number of prisoners was difficult due to restrictions. Nigerian courts are classified as ‘sacred’, and criminal records are untouchable, unreadable and inaccessible. These hindrances posed limits on research efforts to obtain sufficient data for the analysis.
Practical Implications:
The correlation results of the analysis not only show the directions of the variables’ usefulness to each other, but also provide an emerging information resource that may serve as a primary data source or be of use in future investigations.
Originality/Value:
Given the nature of psychometric properties, a new idea concerning the measurement of attitudes has emerged – the scale may be used to measure the treatment of a prisoner’s attitude to recidivism. It might hold the potential to be used as a method to help scholars and experts better define the concept of recidivism.
UDC: 343.8(669.1)
Keywords: recidivism, recidivism, crime, prisons, rehabilitation