Nigerian Correctional Service, NCoS, has distributed after-care materials and tools to 36 ex-offenders that were trained in different vocations in the course of their incarceration at NCoS custodial centres.
NCoS Controller-General, Ja’afaru Ahmed, while distributing the materials to the ex-offenders at the service headquarters in Abuja, said the beneficiaries were from custodial centres across the country.
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The vocational materials presented consist of carpentry, tailoring, electrical, barbing, hair dressing, masonry, laundry, and welding tools.
According to him, the materials are to assist the beneficiaries in starting up their trades and by so doing, ensuring self-sustaining and gainful employment as well as crime-free life.
He said, through the gesture, beneficiaries are now potential employers of labour as already demonstrated by their predecessors.
“The After-Care Scheme has, over the years, proven to be quite critical to the realization of the statutory mandates of the Service as aptly encapsulated in the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS) Act, 2019 with particular reference to the reformation, rehabilitation and subsequent reintegration of inmates back to the society on discharge.
“This is largely because of the scheme’s capacity to keep beneficiaries away from returning to life of crime,” Ja’afaru said.
He said, apart from promoting sundry vocational skills acquisition through industrial workshops and agricultural/farm centres, NCoS had also continued to partner with relevant stakeholders to promote adult remedial education both at the post primary and tertiary levels.
He said the contemporary global penal trend is correction, adding that NCoS would continuously engage serving inmates on activities that have capacity to engender positive change in them.
“I wish to, therefore, call on all the beneficiaries to justify government’s huge investments in providing these vocational tools by working hard and being law-abiding citizens,” Ja’afaru added.
