Rwanda Correctional Services (RCS), on Thursday, May 25, launched construction works for halfway houses, facilities that will be used to prepare prisoners who are about to complete their sentences, for their return to their families and society.

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The first such facilities will be located in Rwamagana District, Eastern Province.

Such initiatives exist in a number of countries in the world, as an effort to assist people with criminal backgrounds or substance use disorder problems to learn (or relearn) the necessary skills to re-integrate into society and better support and care for themselves.

According to information from the RCS, in the local context, halfway social reintegration centres will accept preleased offenders from correctional facilities, and provide basic necessities for them while officials attempt to determine each individual’s problems for reintegration.

The Rwamagana facility, expected to be completed by April 2024, will cost more than Rwf1 billion and will host 2,000 male inmates and 500 females. Similar centres will be built in other provinces. They will provide vocational training and courses on entrepreneurship, conflict resolution, and management, to the prisoners on the verge of release.

The initiative is part of wider plans by the government to improve the justice sector.

According to the country’s new Criminal Justice Policy, the process of dispensation of justice should move from being punitive to correctional so that people become better after serving their jail terms. This applies in half-way houses and in the correctional centres too.

"We are working to equip correctional officers with sufficient knowledge and skills so that the institutions where people are taken, upon conviction, do not be like stores for agricultural produce,” Anastase Nabahire, the Director General for Justice Sector Coordination at the Ministry of Justice, told The New Times in an interview in 2022.

"Those (prisoners) are human beings subject to changing positively or negatively. So they need to be managed as human beings. We should not just put them behind bars and lock them up. That is why schools have been established to train prison guards so that they can impart skills to the people who are sent to prison. We want prisoners to learn something during the time that they are in prison.”

Meanwhile, the government also hopes to increase the use of non-custodial mechanisms for convicts and detainees. The justice sector is expected to make room for the use of penalties like Global Positioning System (GPS) bracelets as a substitute for detention, as well as community service and fines as penalties for some convicts so that the number of people who end up in jail reduces.