The government through the Correctional Services has announced a new plan to ensure prisoners get rewarded for their skills through earning salaries and paying taxes.
While announcing the new plan, Correctional Services Principal Secretary Dr Salome Beacco stated that prisoners will work in workshops and bakeries and start getting paid for it.
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“We want our offenders to work, pay taxes and benefit their families while serving their respective sentences. When the population increases, the number of offenders also increases. All of us can be guests of the state.”
The government has teamed up with development partners among them the Chandaria foundation to start the construction of these structures in various prisons in a modernised way.
According to the proposed initiative, the government will focus on eight key priority areas to ensure that the inmates become productive when they are finally integrated back into society.
The priority areas include, reforms such as automation of revenue collection, legal and policy framework support, revitalisation of prison farms, modernisation of prisons industry and social protection.
In addition to these areas are education and vocational training coordination, institutional infrastructure and operational capacity, housing, and environment and climate change mitigation.
It is also an aim to embrace a right based approach in rehabilitation programmes. For starters, the government is currently constructing bakeries in Kisumu, Mombasa, Meru, Nyeri and Eldoret prisons.
“Once they serve their respective sentences, they are released and part of their time in prison is rehabilitation for seamless integration back into the society.”
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If it goes through, the prisoners will be required to work not as a punishment but as a way of supporting their families from prison through their salaries and paying taxes to support the government.