A fresh start for former convicts

A fresh start

Mrs Mwangangi took him to her house and told him: “If my husband agrees to help you, we will help you, but if he says No, you go.” The Mwangangis gave him fare to go back to his home in Kitui, and although he was very happy to reunite with his father, “the family was in horrible state”, forcing him to come back to Nairobi to put his carpentry skills gained in prison to work.

On September 2, 1996, Mr Mwikya went back to the Mwangangis, who rented a room for him and generally set him up. They linked him to the AIC Church Ziwani where, he says, he got a lot of support. Determined that neither he — nor anyone else — should ever have to go back to jail, he bought two mattresses and opened his 10 by 10 room to ex-convicts he was in touch with, just to break the “jailbird flies back home” jinx.

At one point, they were so many (eight of them) and he thought to himself: “If police found eight ex-prisoners [in a room], they’d think we were planning a robbery.” The Philemon Foundation, which runs Kenya’s first and only halfway house for ex-convicts in Waithaka, a Nairobi suburb, is inspired by one of the shortest books in the Bible — St Paul’s letter to Philemon.

In the letter, the apostle pleads with Philemon, whose slave Onesimus had run away, and somehow landed in jail where he met Paul, to accept him back “as a dear brother” in that Onesimus had now become a Christian. “The message is simple; accept us back,” says Mr Mwikya, as he explains why he chose the name Philemon for his outfit.

“I asked God what kind of organisation I should set up for prisoners, ex-prisoners and their children,” Mr Mwikya to Saturday Nation. Inasmuch as Mr Mwikya yearns “to see many Philemons” the structures to accommodate them are for now non-existent. And although a number of charities are involved in rehabilitating ex-prisoners, their efforts remain minuscule, making a comprehensive aftercare programme key to prison reforms.

Mr Matthias Fettback, the executive director of the Faraja Trust, says, “The Kenyan Government has no rehabilitation programme to talk of, compared to Germany where three quarters of the prisons budget goes to rehabilitation. Developed countries realise that “the cost of crime to society is enormous,” he says.

Unlike Kenya where most rehabilitation work in and out of prison is done by charities, social workers in Germany are appointed to work with inmates on a one-to-one basis. Although Faraja runs rehabilitation programmes for inmates in various prisons including Nairobi West, the Lang’ata Women’s Prison and the Nairobi Remand Home in Industrial Area, with courses open as early as 6am, there is no follow-up once the inmate is released.

And, because there is no official structure to follow up freed inmates, most don’t want to be identified as having been in jail, Mr Fettback says. At the same time, NGOs like Faraja “are too small” to do a statistical survey on who might benefit from rehabilitation.

“By the time we take statistics, kanjo (City Council askaris) have already arrested them for offences as petty as chang’aa brewing,” Mr Fettback says. Jails end up crowded by petty offenders — a situation that is compounded by shoddy investigations by the police. And then “cases take forever to be disposed of,” thanks to an overworked Judiciary.

The result is dissatisfaction among inmates, who are subjected to torture and unreasonable bail terms — all of which only serve to harden prisoners. Partners in the rehabilitation of prisoners have been lobbying for the decongestion of prisons, and their prayer might just have been answered by the passage of a new Constitution, which gives the ex-mural option priority over incarceration for petty crime.

According to Mr Fettback, jails at the moment are filled by petty thieves, pick-pockets and chang’aa distillers; “can they do community work, instead?” he poses, adding: “Recidivism upgrades a petty offender to a big offender. It is a Mafia structure where big offenders recruit young offenders, and unless Kenya is careful, it may run into big problems.”

Says Fettback: “Most offenders are single mothers. If they leave prison without skills, they’ll probably go back to prison. The Nairobi Remand Home is full of youth and women. Women commit crime because of harassment. “They’re the mothers. If you jail them, their kids drop out of school. If the mother is in prison, chances are the children will also go to jail. When you go to prison and come back and there’s nothing there for you, you find yourself back in the hands of the law again.”

Against this backdrop, stakeholders have been working on the Aftercare of Offenders Bill, 2010, which, when it becomes law, will cater for the creation of aftercare services and regulate organisations that provide such services. Ms Khaemba said the final evaluation and validation of the Bill was done in May “and it’s just waiting to go to Parliament”.

Core to the envisaged law is the halfway house, defined as “a transitional house for accommodation of ex-offenders or persons in need of rehabilitative services for purposes of reintegration into the society”. The draft defines Aftercare Service (AC) as embracing “all the rehabilitative services given to offenders, ex-offenders and their families by the AC service providers and other Non-State Actors… directed at equipping them with capacities to cope with life without re-offending and making them law abiding citizens.”

Breaking with the past

The document says: “The nature and type of the aftercare service to be accorded to an individual shall be determined after conducting a needs and risk assessment by the service provider” — a departure from the current situation where inmates receive skills that are often irrelevant to their communities’ and their own needs.

Head of programmes at the Faraja Trust Mary Kuria explains: “We have over-educated our people with no future and with a potential to be criminals. When such youths land in jail, we have to empower them with skills that change their lives.” Traditional skills such as pottery and woodwork are irrelevant to the dot.com prisoner, and the way forward is introducing them to modern skills such as computers and art. Inmates trained by Faraja have had their paintings exhibited in Switzerland.