The Commissioner in charge of safety and security operations in Uganda Prisons Services (UPS) Wilson Francis Magomu has revealed that 36 Uganda Prison Officers are undergoing training on how to rehabilitate and reintegrate extremist prisoners.
The training that is being held at Admans Hotel in Entebbe is facilitated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) with funding from the European Union, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the UN Office on Counter-Terrorism.
Magomu, said that violent extremist inmates are those who are on remand or have been convicted of offences that include terrorism, abetting terrorism, deriving pleasure from causing grievous harm such as burning or amputation of corpses among others.
“The 8 convicts of the 2010 twin bombings in Kampala are among those who have been classified as violent extremist prisoners because such violent inmates mastermind escapes and brawls inside the prisons and can harm themselves or others,” Magomu revealed.
Speaking about the same training the Commissioner General of Uganda Prisons Services, Dr Johnson Byabashaija said that the training is timely because it will prepare the personnel on how to handle violent extremist prisoners and revealed that 189 out of a total of 66,323 inmates are currently in the violent extremist category.
During the training, prisons staff interface experts on how to come up with an integrated approach to rehabilitation and reintegration of prisoners including violent extremist inmates and also identify additional needs and challenges for different categories of violent extremist prisoners.
Dr Peter Bennet, a UNODC prison security expert, said prison staff should learn how to interact with violent inmates and learn how they communicate amongst themselves.
Similar training will be carried out in six prisons across the country that include Kakika in Mbarara, Jinja, Masaka, Luzira Upper Prison and Kitalya to assess how staff will handle violent extremist inmates.
