Pre-Incarceration Career Aspirations and Educational Pursuit of Inmates in Abia State, Nigeria's Penitentiary

Abstract

The study assessed the pre-incarceration career aspirations and educational pursuit of inmates in Abia State's penitentiary. Specifically, it described the socio-economic characteristics of the inmates, identified their livelihood activities before incarceration; ascertained career aspirations of the inmates after incarceration, and the educational opportunities available in the prisons. A simple random technique was used to draw 162 inmates from Umuahia, Aba and Arochukwu prisons, as sample size. Structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics; means and frequencies. The study found that Abia state prisons were dominated by males, young and singles with small number of females, both within the mean age of 27.7. Livelihood activities before incarceration of the inmates showed that the majority of them (51.9%) were Artisan/Craft workers, followed by Business men/women (38.9%), Stealing (21.6%), raping (10.5%) while video coverage and editing recorded the lowest (6.8%). For career aspiration after incarceration, the study showed that trading had 34.0% while artisan had 33.3%. That was followed by vehicle driving (25.3%), engineering (24.1%), law (20.4%), teaching (21.6%), pastoring (19.1%), and, farming (17.9%). This showed a huge shift in their career aspirations before and after incarceration. It was found that there were educational programmes in the prison, from basic to university education. This enabled the inmates to acquire more education which influenced their new career aspirations. It was therefore recommended that the Government should fund these educational programmes adequately so that the prisons would be reformatory.