{"id":100318,"date":"2015-03-18T05:20:13","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T05:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=100318"},"modified":"2015-03-18T05:20:13","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T05:20:13","slug":"judges-to-be-made-to-visit-prisons-regularly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=100318","title":{"rendered":"Judges to be made to visit prisons regularly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Chief Justice her Ladyship Georgina Theodora Woode has instituted a practice to get judges to visit the prisons every month.<\/p>\n<p>[contextly_sidebar id=&#8221;Cxko8KdvJgmCp6rEnqFLX52q6YtZ5JU8&#8243;]Per this practice the judges will visit a prison facility\u00a0to acquaint themselves with the conditions in the prison so they can be better informed when carrying out their duties.<\/p>\n<p>This is part of the measures the Prison Service Council and the Chief Justice are taking to make conditions at the prisons better.<\/p>\n<p>This came to light when the Council paid a courtesy call on the Chief Justice.<\/p>\n<p>Chairman of the Prison Service Council\u00a0Rev Stephen Wingam told <strong>Citi News<\/strong> the Chief Justice has already started this by leading some judges to visit the prisons.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe has proven her commitment to it by getting some of the judges to visit the Akuse prisons over the weekend,\u201d he revealed.<\/p>\n<p>The focus of the Council is to improve the conditions at the prison which has been describe by a 2012 Amnesty international report on Ghana\u2019s prisons as cruel, inhumane and degrading.<\/p>\n<p>To overcome the issue of over-crowding the Chief Justice also indicated her commitment to ensure that the discharge warrant issued by the court for a prisoner\u2019s release will be given directly to the Prison Service instead of the Police.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gov\u2019t targets end of 2015 for implementation of non-custodial sentencing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This comes on the back of the\u00a0presentation of a report on non-custodial sentencing policy to the Chief Justice by the Interior Minister Mark Woyongo.<\/p>\n<p>Non-custodial sentencing is a sentence given by a court of law which does not involve serving time in prison but it may include a fine, a restriction order, probation order or community service order.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014, stakeholders in the criminal justice system collaborated with the Judicial Service, the Ministry of Justice and Attorney-General and the Ghana Prisons Service to find the possible ways to implement the non-custodial penal code.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>By Betty Kankam-Boadu\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Chief Justice her Ladyship Georgina Theodora Woode has instituted a practice to get judges to visit the prisons every month. [contextly_sidebar id=&#8221;Cxko8KdvJgmCp6rEnqFLX52q6YtZ5JU8&#8243;]Per this practice the judges will visit a prison facility\u00a0to acquaint themselves with the conditions in the prison so they can be better informed when carrying out their duties. This is part of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":3963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[43,38],"class_list":["post-100318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-foresight-medical-center","tag-palaver-newspaper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}