A pioneering book on prisons in West Africa, Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria is the first comprehensive presentation of life inside a West African prison. Chapters by prisoners inside Kirikiri maximum security prison in Lagos, Nigeria are published alongside chapters by scholars and activists. While prisoners document the daily realities and struggles of life inside a Nigerian prison, scholar and human rights activist Viviane Saleh-Hanna provides historical, political, and academic contexts and analyses of the penal system in Nigeria. The European penal models and institutions imported to Nigeria during colonialism are exposed as intrinsically incoherent with the community-based conflict-resolution principles of most African social structures and justice models. This book presents the realities of imprisonment in Nigeria while contextualizing the colonial legacies that have resulted in the inhumane brutalities that are endured on a daily basis. Keywords: Nigeria, West Africa, penal system, maximum-security prison. Published in English.

Reform : perspectives, possibilities and alternatives.

The Nigeria Criminal Justice System has not been fairing well from colonial times to date. Its penal system is within the ambit of imprisonment and fine. Looking at socio-economic conditions of Nigerians, those who cannot afford to pay the fine where it is imposed, have no option than to end up in prison. Majority of inmates leave the prison with no savings, no immediate entitlement to unemployment benefits, and few job prospects in addition to other problems related to life after prison. It is based on these identified problems that inform this study. The problems identified are more common among developing nations particularly in African. The work represent magnificent feat of synthesis in criminal justice system as a whole. The author have resourceful confronted the inherent problems in Nigeria criminal justice system, enough to excite the readers to reflect on our judicial system in order to understand the present predicament in our criminal justice system and anticipate the future. This work is an essential reading not only for students of criminology, sociology, government, but also for those sincerely concern with development in criminal law and criminal justice system.

First published in 1969, African Penal Systems is the first book to explore the problems of African criminology. Sixteen distinguished contributors- sociologists, lawyers, and psychiatrists- each an authority on some aspect of African penal problems, have collaborated to produce it. Its first part gives a general survey of the penal systems of some fourteen African countries, variously English, French, or Portuguese inclined, or wholly autochthonous. Part two includes six specialist contributions on various detailed problems in the development and operation of the modern African systems. In his introduction Alan Milner, describes the sociological forces responsible for the increase of crime in Africa and examines the possibility of the growth of a peculiarly African approach to the solution of its penal problems. This is a must read for scholars and researchers African Studies, criminology, and African Law.