The Northern Regional Minister, Alhaji Mustapha Idris, has urged the Prisons Service Council to establish workshops for prison inmates in the country. This, he said, would expose the inmates to entrepreneurial skills to make them self reliant after discharge from prison custody. Alhaji Idris stated this when he formally inaugurated a nine-member Northern Regional Prisons Committee last weekend in Tamale. The Committee was constituted to advise the Prisons Council and the Director-General of the Prisons Service on any matter relating to the administration of prisoners and the Prisons Service in the region. He explained that the introduction of entrepreneurial skill training to the inmates would help reform them and boost the national economy as they would support themselves and their families. The minister said the current conditions and training in which the prisoners were engaged in was not helping the situation but rather worsening it. He regretted that such objective has not been achieved due to the deplorable state of the prisons. Alhaji Idris therefore, urged the regional prison committee to come up with pragmatic measures to realise the set goals and objectives. The minister expressed concern about the feeding of inmates and appealed to the service to strengthen the engagement of prison inmates in agricultural activities to supplement the efforts of government to enhance their diet. The chairman of the Prisons Council, Samuel Ashietey, mentioned overcrowding, poor conditions of service and deplorable state of the prisons as some challenges facing the service. Mr Ashitey pledged the Council’s readiness to support the committee to enable it work effectively to help achieve the needed results. He also encouraged the committee to work as a team to help transform the image of the service. The Commander of the Tamale Prisons, E. C. Adjei Korien, said the formation of prisons committee would assist in finding solutions to problems facing the service. The committee is chaired by the Regional Minister with representatives of Muslims, Christians, Attorney General’s Department, Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Prison Service and Social Welfare. Source: The Ghanaian Times