Use sport to rehabilitate prisoners back into society

Editorial Comment
At a promotions event in Bulawayo a choir of prisoners, apparently from Khami Prison just outside Bulawayo, entertained the gathering with melodious songs.

SOME WEEKS ago at a promotions event in Bulawayo a choir of prisoners, apparently from Khami Prison just outside Bulawayo, entertained the gathering with melodious songs. They were in full prison garb.

Their guards were in full attendance, of course, but were not part of the choir which also recited some odes.

The prisoners mixed and mingled with the public invited to the event and, save for their garb, no one would have noticed they were in jail serving time for crime of one nature or another.

Obviously those prisoners were of a small, if any, flight risk and were most likely serving light sentences or about to complete their time, hence it would have been futile for any of them to flee.

If anything, they enjoyed experiencing a “normal” life, albeit for a very short period.

The scene set a thought running through my mind — surely sport, especially football, has a role it could play in the rehabilitation of the offender, to use a more politically-correct term.

Algerian-born French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist and philosopher, Albert Camus, says: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”, and this certainly makes the point that soccer and sport in general can play a critical role in integrating those of our relatives that are in prison back into society once their terms are done.

The crusade could start with setting up a football team for prisoners, rather than prison guards, and register this team in the lower divisions that play under the Zimbabwe Football Association.

By the way, Camus was goalkeeper of the University of Algiers football team while studying at the university for his first degree.

A lot of young people are today committing crimes, some very petty and they end up in jail, some of them simply because they cannot afford to hire lawyers.

Have we not heard of the saying the rich do not go to jail? They simply buy their way out. Others end up in remand prison for long periods due to the wheels of justice turning slowly.

Quite a good number of people leaving prison at the end of their term are often soon back in the cells because they find life outside prison more difficult than inside due to several reasons.

Chief among those reasons are stigmatisation by society and failure to find something economically viable to help get food into the stomach.

As a result, there is a high rate of repeat offenders in the country and these are worsening the crowding prevalent in our prisons.

If sport, working with various other stakeholders, went into prisons and introduced sport at a serious level, rather than just as social, the country in general and some individual prisoners in particular could benefit immensely.

Who knows, maybe the next soccer star who propels Zimbabwe to unprecedented success on the international scene could be discovered in the prisons and juvenile remand homes scattered all over the country.

Some prisoners have been known to be very violent – some of them are in fact, inside to serve sentences for violence – and their energy could be directed to something beneficial to both themselves and the country if they were trained in boxing, for example.

In any case, the modern term for prisons today is correctional services, implying that the whole idea of sending someone to such gaols is to give them an opportunity to correct their behaviour so that they could fit correctly into society.

Sport, especially team sports like football, netball and rugby, among many others, would help prisoners learn values such as self-discipline and teamwork.

In addition, interaction with people from outside the prison on the sports field might help felons appreciate the seriousness of whatever crime that sent them to jail. They would learn to take responsibility for their actions.

At one time the country had an organisation called the Zimbabwe Society for Rehabilitation of the Offender which worked with prisons services in, among other things, imparting skills to prisoners so that they could use such skills once outside.

This was all in a bid to reduce, if not eliminate, the chances of ex-prisoners falling back into crime in order to earn a living.

If that society still exists today, maybe it should partner with football and other disciplines in introducing serious sport in prisons and help unearth uncut diamonds in boxing, football and athletics, especially.

These three disciplines do not require a huge financial investment and there are lots of people outside prison who could be engaged as trainers.

Of course work to change the attitude of the general public towards ex-prisoners would have to be undertaken for such a scheme to be a success.

It is natural that most people are jealous of their neighbour succeeding and this would surely be turned into scorn should an ex-prisoner be suddenly found earning loads of money as a heavyweight boxer or a national footballer!

– The Mbada Holdings Diamonds Cup — the country’s richest knockout tournament will roar into life this weekend with matches set for tomorrow and Sunday and with some of the venues hosting double-headers.

The football grounds should be bursting at the seams given that Mbada and the football authorities have agreed to give the entry tickets on a bacossi — at the $1 entry charge — every one, even the poorest of the poor, will afford to be at the matches.

My fear, however, is the aftermath of this populist move.

Will fans in future understand that this was peculiar only to the Mbada tournament or will they take the feeling that clubs are extorting money from them by charging the usual $5 and other fees!

Mbada are of course looking at their own interests — filling up the stadia is far more than excellent mileage for them and what with the matches being screened live on SuperSport!