Kenya Prison Service committed to ensure prisoners acquire skills through rehabilitation

Kenya Prison Service Director General Brigadier (rtd) John Warioba has said that the Department is committed to ensure that offenders are not only rehabilitated but acquire skills that will enable them integrate with the society once they are out.

Warioba said that they have reviewed prisoner training programmes to align with the government's Bottom-Up Economic Transformation agenda with prisoners given necessary skills and certification to seek employment opportunities or plunge into entrepreneurship upon sentence completion.

The Director General who was addressing the Media after meeting with senior staff in his department in Nairobi yesterday said that they have also reorganized their human capital by coming up with programmes that identify and reward serving talent while attracting and retaining new talent."Recently we had 222 Cadet officers who graduated after 13 months training with these graduates including but not limited to engineers, pilots, economists, lawyers, medical doctors, agronomists, economists and actuarial scientists, we are developing a serious talent pool," said Warioba.

The Director General said that they support initiatives by stakeholders in the Criminal Justice system to ensure that Alternative Disputes Resolution Mechanisms are applied in order to decongest the Prisons which are holding thousands of petty offenders who do not necessarily have to be incarcerated.

Warioba said that Kenya Prison Services is working with the State Department for Correctional Services to produce varieties of seedlings for different ecological areas in Kenya in support of President William Ruto's 15 billion trees afforestation programme.

He said that so far they have planted 443,025 trees in prisons institutions across the country and that they are engaging both the staff and prisoners in ensuring that they contribute towards the country attaining the 10 percent forest cover in efforts to tame desertification.

"Besides the trees planted in Prisons we have also planted 2,010 trees planted under Community Service Order Afforestation Programme, 5,000 trees planted at the Kianjuki-ini Forest in Kirinyaga County and the Marmanet Forest initiative which aims to plant an additional 100,000 trees," said Warioba.