Four Walls

There was a clatter and the door swung open.

"Good morning, Okoro", The warder sneered mockingly

Okoro looked up with disgust at this black Yoruba man with scary tribal marks, who had tormented him a lot during his six years here in the jail. He rubbed his eyes with his huge palms and cleaned the signs of sleep on his face away. He slowly stood up ad stretched.

"Abeg do fast and follow me", he commanded rather brusquely, already walking forward.

Okoro followed the warder through the prison's hallways ignoring the other inmates and their jibess and rants. It had been something he used to do. Banging his fists against his cell door and jeering at warders. But now that he was leaving prison he didn't feel that the barbaric act was so cool anymore. He smiled back at and waved at his inmates friends as they hailed him. They'd been in this together but he certainly didn't feel bad leaving them. In fact, he was rather glad. He was led by the warder to a room where he was given the clothes he had worn at the time of his arrest. He wasn't surprised his wallet which had held about 10,000 Naira at the time of his arrest was now empty and his gold wristwatch was not among the personal effects released to him. He often wondered what the difference was between the warders and prisoners, They were more or less all criminals, they all wore uniforms and stayed here in prison.

After receiving a stupid talk which he had hardly heard a word of from the Chief warder, Okoro was home free. He was only interested in getting out of here and starting a new life for himself. He cared less about the Chief Jailer or any of the things he had to say. All that filled his mind were thought about how he was going to put his life back on track. He recalled how well things were going for him before the incident that brought him here had occurred, Toying with his beard which had become quite bushy during his stay here, he began to reminisce about what had brought him here.

Okoro had been a young accountant at a big firm here in Lagos. Freshly graduated from the Obafemi Awolowo University with a first class degree in Accounting, he'd easily secured a job with JayJay plc, a leading manufacturing firm with various subsidiaries manufacturing different types of goods. He had quickly moved up the ranks through his sheer brilliance and quickly became an accountant on the firm's headquarters, at the helm of many major accounts. He was receiving a fat paycheck, had a car and a house of his own. He was very comfortable and was even preparing to get married to his fiancee, Aminat, who he had been dating for five years already. They had met back in the university. She had studied pharmacy but one way or the other, they got to know each other and became very close friends, starting out slow. After graduation, they'd begun dating before he finally asked her the big question wedding preparations were very much progress when the incidence that had changed his life occurred.

It all begun the day two of his co-workers, Mark and Uche had come to his office to see him. They'd started out with small talks about football, politics, women and so on. Okoro was in fact already getting bored of their discussion and couldn't wait for them to leave, wondering why this two men who actually didn't speak to that much on a normal day where here to disrupt his concentration at work their dry talks. The chats slowly drifted into talks about the economy and how hard things were for people in this country. At this point, Okoro's attention was already divided between the transaction he was processing on his computer system and what they were saying. His replied to them slowly went from one word responses to mere sounds. At the apex of this nuisance they were displaying his office, Uche finally said something that caught his attention.

He talked about a carefully fabricated plan to embezzle the sum of 3 billion Naira from the firm within two months. Okoro listened with awe and was surprised the little part he had to play in the scheme. They would get a billion each and then go their separate ways, resigning from the firm one by one. The plan was beautiful and Okoro soon found himself joining them to perpetrate it. It was only a month and a half when the company caught wind of their loot and Okoro was arrested in his office. Uche and Mark had read the danger signs an had run away, perhaps out of the country. Okoro was arraigned on a ten count charge but only got prosecuted for fraud and malpractice which earned him 7-10 years jail term.

His first few years in prison had been turbulent. Getting used to the food and the environment was no mean task. At first Aminat was supportive, visiting him everyday. Slowly the daily visits reduced to once a week, then once in a month, before it drifted into nothingness till he received a letter from her three years into his prison term in which she explained to him that she had moved on and was already married to someone else, who happened to be the lawyer who had defended him in court three years ago, and was now pregnant for him. His sorrow knew no bounds and he had sat up the whole night wailing and crying. After that, he moved on and adjusted well to prison life.

Now there he stood six years later being paroled on probation due to his good behaviour while in jail. Prison, oh prison. Often he wondered if prison was supposed to be just a place of punishment to keep criminal away from the society or a place to rehabilitate prisoners and then reintegrate them into the society as better people. To him, it was more of the former than the later and it had succeeded in making him a worse person coming out of prison more of a criminal than he was going. He now knew a lot of crooked things and could easily commit a crime with less chances of getting caught. He had learned from the mistakes that had taken a lot of his inmate friends into prison. Truly, prison had made him worse. He was now a criminal on the loose and a pending disaster waiting to happen.

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The prison system of many countries is often structured in a way that prisoners often come out prison worse than they already were. Prisons breed criminals instead of rehabilitating them. Also, when many convicts make it out of prison, the become segregated from the community and discriminated against, forcing them to go back to a life of crime. These are very pivotal issues that need to be addressed, don't you think?

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With love,

@ajremy (The teen with steam for steem)