Voices from Behind the Bars: Kidnappers’ Natural Self-Accounting Views, Perceptions, and Feelings on Kidnapping in the Southeastern States of Nigeria

Abstract

ABSTRACTAssumptions and debates on the trend, causes or motives, implications, and appropriate sanctions on kidnapping dominate literature, are largely speculative, and come mainly from the media or academic and nonacademic writers. The aim of this article is to explore the perspectives, perceptions, feelings, and thinking of kidnappers, in their raw form, on these sub-areas of kidnapping. This paper engages a naturalistic methodological approach, whereby sampled kidnappers in Abakaliki and Umuahia prisons provided self-account narratives of the criminal activities and worldview based on their social construction and interpretative meanings. Cross-sectional survey design, and a nonprobability sampling technique of respondent-driven sampling type, were utilized to select a sample of 86 from a total population of 123 convicted and nonconvicted inmates. Findings confirmed public concerns on the epidemiological rise in kidnapping in Nigeria, the dominance of economic motive as the driving force, significant negative sociopsychological and economic-cum-political implications, but moderate, smart, and balanced sanctions versus the punitive policy were generally favored. The policy implication calls for social inclusion and job opportunities (especially among the productive population), value reorientation, and mental sea-change, and a smart but cool, dispassionate, nonpanicked, and nonhurried penal policy.