Life behind bars calls for divine intervention if the better part of your remaining days on earth will be withing those fortified walls. Prisoners with powerful connections, do not have to worry about getting out, otherwise, its gonna be a heavy dosage of struggles while serving your sentence. But as an inmate, you can work your way out in reducing your jail term through good behaviour.
Four inmates serving death or life imprisonment filed a criminal petition challenging the exclusion of those who were previously on death row and life imprisonment from the remission of sentences referring to a similar petition which the state had conceded to.
According to the Prisons Act convicted criminal prisoners sentenced for a period exceeding one month, may by industry and good conduct earn a remission of one-third of their sentence or sentences. A Kisumu High Court Judge ruled that there was no evidence that the petitioners were excluded from remission by operation of the Act. Consequently, the court found that the petitioners are entitled to benefit from remission.
The judge blamed state actors for ignoring the orders in which the Judiciary opened remission of sentences to all convicted criminal prisoners.
“There are numerable decisions from this court that remission of the sentence is available to all convicted criminal prisoners which the cabinet secretary for the time being responsible for Internal Security and the Prisons Commissioner General seem not to be aware of or have ignored,” he said.
The constitution provides that every person has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law. Commissioner General of Prisons had been previously bee given a directive to consider prisoners for the remission of sentence in compliance with Section 46 of the Prisons Act. This one third remission law was passed in efforts to decongest jails after a Judiciary task force reported that local prisons hosted more than double their inmates’ capacity.