The death of a 19-year-old Brian OpioKau at theGuluCentral prison is a clarion call to the country to embrace restorative justice mechanisms as oppose to punitive confinement especially for young and petty offenders. Fellow inmates allegedly beat up Opio to death just three days after being remanded. His only crime was a colonial era petty offence of “rouge and vagabondism.”
According to the deceased mother Agnes Apio police on a night patrol within Gulu town arrested her son on his way to a nightclub. He was subsequently charged and remanded into Gulu Central prison. A fellow inmate narrated that Opio was beaten badly by fellow inmates for touching a door he was not supposed to touch. Now whereas the Gulu prison authorities were quick to dispute the cause of death as a result of beating, evidence suggests that such beating are indeed a very common practice in our detention facilities and in particular against young offenders. According to Ogweng, a former inmate at Gulu Central Prison and Lugore interviewed by Amani Institute Uganda, “inside the jail is a law of the jungle and when you survive once, you are more than ready to go back and pay…” The point here is that we should protect our young one who comes in conflict with the law from hardened criminals. Our justice system must endeavor to correct offenders and restore them into law abiding and productive citizens, not end their life or turn them into habitual and harden criminals. By exposing young petty offenders to mentorship by hard-core criminals, our current justice system does the reverse. Amani Institute Uganda seeks to protect rights and promote access to justice for vulnerable and at risks population, catalyse social change and harness local resources for peace, justice, climate adaption and resilience, civic awareness, juvenile rehabilitation, legal aid, information sharing, leadership development and capacity building.