With impressive levels of unemployment and poverty, crime is rampant in Kenya with a majority of prison population found guilty of petty and poverty related crimes like loitering, vagrancy, charcoal burning, hawking, prostitution, brewing, drinking or selling traditional brews. These in actual fact are survival and copping mechanisms for the poor.

The irony is that real criminals who pose the biggest threat to Kenyan’s socio-economic welfare are able to hire top notch lawyers, pay court fines or simply bribe their way out. The poor do not have money for legal representation or for paying court fines.  As a result they are incarcerated and become a burden to the taxpayer; they leave prison worse off only to return for one reason or another. As one prison officer once put it:

•         I really sympathize with many of these prisoners who fill our penal institutions; they are so poor that keeping them here will just harden them while the actual crooks never end up in prison.

•          Kenya has 97 prisons with a capacity of 16,000 inmates but now holding 50,000.