Continuing Education Needs of Custodial Adult Inmates for Sustainable Community Development in Zamfara State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study assessed the Continuing Education Needs of Custodial Adult Inmates for Sustainable Community Development in Zamfara State, Nigeria. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study was 762 respondents in the 5 Nigerian Correctional Custodial Centres of Zamfara State. Purposive sampling technique was used to sample 351 Custodial Adult Inmates comprising all the 266 male and 85 female convicted inmates of the Gusau Central Custodial Centre for the study. The instrument used for data collection was self-structured questionnaire tagged “Questionnaire on the Continuing Education Needs of Custodial Adult Inmates (QACENCAI)”. The instrument was subjected to face validation by three experts. The reliability coefficient for the instrument was 0.85. The data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics of mean, while the null hypotheses were tested using t-test at the probability of 0.05 level of significance. The study showed that there were only two Continuing Education (CE) programmes for Adult inmates in Gusau Central Custodial Centre and at the time of the study, there were convicts trainees in the CE programmes of the Gusau Central Custodial Centre. Based on these findings, the study recommended among others that the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS) should introduce more CE programmes and extend them to other Satellite’s Custodial Centres of the state for sustainable community development in the study area and country at large.