A five-day capacity building workshop has been launched to train some selected senior officers at the Senior Correctional Centre in Accra.

The training programme aims at building the capacity of officers as well as refreshing and upgrading their performance on how to handle inmates.

Launching the training course in Accra Monday, the Deputy Director of Prisons, Al-Hassan Naah Nahii said the program will go a long way to help officers in discharging their duties.

He further urged the participants to pay close attention to details and learn in order to gain the full benefit of the course.

“This training course will help our officers here know how to handle these inmates, these are juvenile offenders, they are not criminals but per our training we are inclined to use certain pressure on the inmates,” he said.

Deputy Director of Standard, Monitoring and Evaluation with Social Welfare, Georgina Mensah noted that character formation is key in training children adding that the major factors that bring children into conflict of the law is not poverty but character.

She said, “factors that bring children into conflict with the law is not about poverty but rather character because not all poor children engage in criminal activities and so when you have character reformed then you are sure that whatever correction you have done is sustainable”.

According to her, inculcating a scheme of rewarding inmates when they put up good behaviour rather than always punishing them when they do wrong will help the inmates develop good characters.