Why not contrive options for the high number of reoffending youths?

By Ronald Twinamasiko

WHEN one makes a trip to the prisons, or police cells, she or he would be amazed at the age of the arrested and imprisoned people. 

Most of these take prisons cells as their resting places, thereby qualifying to be habitual offenders who have been convicted of a crime several times. Some offenders may account for the same crime many times, while others may hold many convictions for different crimes on their record.

Our country today is ranked among the fastest growing populations in the world, with more young people than the aged. This has consequentially led the bigger part of the people into a chronic-cyclic dependency plight, given the status of the economy, especially now that inflation has intrinsically discouraged many have-nots of a better livelihood. 

Though regarded as Uganda’s potential, the would-be productive youths have alternated to unconstitutional social norms coaxing them to commit serious violent or sexual offences.

Furthermore, a number of youthful habitual offenders have been entrenched into a criminal career of addiction because of their low economic status. Benefiting almost nothing from the process of development, the youths who yearn for satisfaction and community buy-in have alternated into uncouth acts in drug and alcohol-related crimes (such as public drunkenness, drug possession, rape, defilement and even murder offences). 

In Uganda today, reoffending has become so unacceptably high that three in five offences by criminals for any convictions have had youths to their name. As a result, most victimized youth offenders have been exposed to harsher legal penalties in higher fines, longer prison sentences, loss of various rights and privileges, such as the freedom of association and access to state resources, negative impacts on the defendant’s child custody privileges.

Even so, a greater number of the younger people have been classified as high-risk offenders most eventually break free of drugs and crime and go on to lead productive lives, especially as they get older.

But instead of thrusting rehabilitation programs and focusing youth-friendly economically empowering programs, the state has fundamentally determined the high-risk offenders (most of whom are of the younger generation) be incarcerated in state prisons for long periods of time to move them beyond their peak years of criminality. 

It is only a few of the rehabilitation systems that have been established to restore the lives of habitual offenders, most of whom are teenagers. Such a situation poses questions over the ability of the state and its justice system to reorient delinquents. 

The circumstances underscore the urgent need for effective intervention mechanisms by human rights and other civil society groups to advocate for system reforms and introduce a rehabilitation revolution to our human rights and justice systems. 

The laudable complementary role played by the Yearning Voices Foundation, Foundation for Human Rights Initiative and other civil society human rights groups should remind the state authorities of their fundamental obligation to realise an equitably transformed Uganda. 

In addressing the existing causes, the juvenile-dominated criminal records will be countered.