Beyond The Cell Door

Abstract
On 4 March 2026, the Ghanaian government laid the Community Service Bill, 2026, before Parliament, marking the most significant proposed reform to Ghana’s criminal sentencing architecture since independence. On 29 May 2026, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Defence and Interior, Hon. James Agalga, presented the Committee’s report to the House for consideration. The Bill seeks to introduce community service as a non-custodial alternative sentence for offences attracting a maximum of three years’ imprisonment, addressing a prison system operating at 166% of its designed capacity. This article argues that the Bill is best understood not merely as a pragmatic response to prison overcrowding but as a constitutionally mandated expression of the restorative justice philosophy that Ghana’s criminal jurisprudence has long espoused in theory but failed to honour in practice. Drawing on the 1992 Constitution, the ADR Act, 2010 (Act 798), the UN Standard Minimum Rules for Non-Custodial Measures (the Tokyo Rules), and comparative experience from Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, and Rwanda, the article assesses the constitutional foundations and human rights dimensions of the Bill, examines the spectrum of non-custodial sentencing options available to Ghanaian courts, situates community service within the broader philosophy of restorative justice and African jurisprudential tradition, and identifies the implementation challenges that will determine whether the Bill becomes a genuine instrument of penal reform or another well-intentioned statute that falls short in practice.

I. Introduction: A Nation That Punishes More Than It Heals

There is a terrible irony at the heart of Ghana’s criminal justice system. A country whose Constitution declares the dignity of the human person to be inviolable,[1] and whose foundational law demands that the rights of convicted persons to humane treatment be protected,[2] runs a prison system so chronically overcrowded that it punishes the incarcerated not by the sentence imposed but by the conditions endured. Ghana’s prisons, designed to hold approximately 9,000 inmates, currently confine over 15,000, an occupancy rate of 166% across forty-four facilities.[3] The prison population has grown from 9,507 in 2000 to over 15,000 in 2023, driven not by an explosion of serious crime but by the system’s near-exclusive reliance on two instruments: the fine and the prison sentence. As one peer-reviewed study bluntly observed, to this date Ghana had no community service policy, and the penology system continued to rely on incarceration and fines, with many persons charged to pay a fine ending up imprisoned because they could not afford it.[4]

Against this backdrop, the Community Service Bill, 2026 — laid before Parliament on 4 March 2026 and reported upon by the Parliamentary Committee on Defence and Interior on 29 May 2026 — represents not merely a pragmatic intervention to decongest the nation’s cells, but a philosophical repositioning of the purpose of punishment itself.[5] The Interior Minister has said as much. The Bill, he declared, goes beyond easing overcrowding and seeks to reshape the philosophy of punishment. This article takes that declaration seriously and examines whether the Ghanaian legal system has the constitutional foundations, the jurisprudential tradition, and the institutional architecture to make good on it.

The argument proceeds in seven parts. Part II sets out the constitutional framework within which the Bill must be assessed. Part III examines the full spectrum of non-custodial sentencing. Part IV situates community service within the restorative justice philosophy, with particular attention to African jurisprudential tradition. Part V surveys comparative experience across the continent and beyond. Part VI provides a critical assessment of the Bill’s strengths and the implementation challenges that must be addressed. Part VII concludes with a normative assessment of what the Bill demands of the courts, the legislature, and the Ghanaian community it enlists as a partner in justice.

II. The Constitutional Architecture: Punishment, Dignity, and the Rehabilitative Imperative

Ghana’s 1992 Constitution does not merely authorise punishment; it constrains and directs it. The relevant provisions compose a coherent philosophy that the criminal justice system has honoured more in citation than in practice.

Article 15(1) declares the dignity of all persons inviolable. Article 15(2) prohibits subjecting any person to torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. These provisions impose a direct obligation on the state in the design and administration of sentences: any sentencing regime that by its structural operation degrades the human dignity of those it touches — through overcrowding, disease, and the destruction of reintegrative capacity — is not merely inhumane in the colloquial sense; it is constitutionally suspect.[6]

Article 14, which guarantees personal liberty and sets out the grounds on which it may be curtailed, requires that the deprivation of liberty be proportionate to the legitimate aims of the criminal law. The courts have long recognised that proportionality is not only a sentencing principle but a constitutional one: a sentence that is grossly disproportionate to the offence committed, or that crushes the offender beyond what justice requires, is not a legitimate exercise of state power. The principle applies with especial force to minor offences for which the legislature’s own maximum sentence signals a limited culpability assessment.[7]

Crucially, Article 35(6)(d) of the Directive Principles of State Policy requires the state to make democracy a reality and to afford all possible opportunities to the people to participate in their own governance. While that provision is not judicially enforceable in the same direct sense as the fundamental rights provisions, it encodes a constitutional preference for community participation in social processes — including, this article contends, in the processes of justice. A criminal justice system that removes offenders from community life and returns them, months or years later, damaged and further alienated, is not advancing the constitutional goal of community participation; it is undermining it.[8]

The Bill’s constitutional warrant is therefore not merely permissive; the Constitution, properly read, affirmatively demands an alternative to a custodial regime that has been demonstrably incapable of delivering rehabilitation, proportionality, or humane treatment at scale.

III. The Sentencing Spectrum: Where Community Service Fits

To appreciate the significance of the Bill, one must map the broader landscape of sentencing options available in Ghana’s criminal law. The existing options form a hierarchy of severity, and community service enters a gap that the present system has left conspicuously empty.

(a) Imprisonment

Imprisonment remains the default custodial response for indictable offences under the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29) and the Criminal and Civil Procedure Code, 1960 (Act 30). It carries the strongest retributive and incapacitative force but also the greatest cost — financial, human, and social. Ghana spent an estimated GH¢700 million annually on its prison system by 2023, with 95% of that cost attributable to salaries and feeding, leaving negligible resources for rehabilitation programming.[9] The recidivism data, where available, is damning: a system that returns offenders to society more damaged than it received them is not serving the deterrence or rehabilitation rationales it invokes.

(b) Fines

Fines are the most common non-custodial sentence under Ghana’s current framework. Their critical defect is well-documented: their burden falls disproportionately on the poor. An offender who cannot pay a fine serves a custodial term in default, which means that the financial status of the accused, rather than the gravity of the offence, determines whether a sentence is custodial. This is not proportionality; it is discrimination.[10]

(c) Probation

Probation, available under the Criminal Procedure Code, allows an offender to remain in the community under conditions set by the court and supervised by a probation officer. It is underutilised in Ghana, partly because the probation service is chronically under-resourced. It is most appropriate for first-time offenders and juvenile offenders, and its rehabilitative potential is well-supported by comparative evidence. Its weakness is that it requires sustained institutional supervision, which places demands on a system already strained.

(d) Suspended Sentences

A suspended sentence imposes a custodial term but defers its execution on condition of good behaviour for a specified period. It carries a deterrent function but contributes nothing to rehabilitation or victim restoration, and it does not address the structural gap between imprisonment and freedom that community service is designed to fill.

(e) Community Service: The Missing Instrument

Community service occupies a distinct and largely unoccupied place in this spectrum. It requires the offender to perform unpaid work of benefit to the community — typically for a specified number of hours — in lieu of a custodial sentence. The Bill targets offences punishable by a maximum of three years’ imprisonment, with or without a fine.[11] At that threshold, it captures precisely the class of offences for which imprisonment is most clearly disproportionate: minor assaults, petty dishonesty, first-time regulatory breaches, fine default. For this class, community service offers a sentence that is neither the financial tyranny of the fine nor the institutional destruction of the prison, but a structured contribution to the community the offender has harmed.

IV. Restorative Justice and the African Jurisprudential Tradition

Community service is not merely a utilitarian alternative to imprisonment. It is the most visible manifestation of restorative justice in the formal criminal law, and its introduction into Ghana’s sentencing architecture is therefore an act of jurisprudential as well as penal significance.

Restorative justice, in its contemporary theoretical form, holds that crime is primarily a violation of relationships — between offender and victim, between offender and community — and that justice is achieved not by the infliction of a proportionate quantum of suffering on the offender but by the repair of those relationships. Its core instruments are accountability (the offender acknowledges the harm done), reparation (the offender makes amends), and reintegration (the offender is restored to a productive social role).[12] These three imperatives do not merely echo good penological practice; they echo the deepest traditions of African jurisprudence.

The Akan concept of onipa na ohia onipa — a person needs others to be a person — encodes the understanding that human identity is fundamentally relational and communal, and that the disruption of communal relations by antisocial conduct demands a communal response, not merely a state-administered penalty. The Zulu concept of ubuntu — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, I am because we are — expresses the same ontology: the person exists in and through the community, and harm to the community is harm to the self of the offender as much as to the victim.[13] Traditional dispute resolution mechanisms across the continent — the Ghanaian chief’s court, the Rwandan gacaca, the ubuntu-based community hearings of Southern Africa — were, in their essential structure, restorative rather than retributive: they sought not to isolate the offender in suffering but to reweave the social fabric he had torn.[14]

Ghana has already recognised restorative justice in its formal legal architecture. The Alternative Dispute Resolution Act, 2010 (Act 798), institutionalises mediation, negotiation, and customary arbitration as mechanisms for resolving civil disputes — mechanisms that are, at their core, restorative in their insistence on relationship repair and mutually acceptable outcomes.[15] The Community Service Bill extends that philosophy, for the first time, into the criminal domain. It is not a foreign transplant onto Ghanaian legal soil; it is a homecoming.

The classical theories of punishment — retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation — have each found expression in Ghana’s criminal jurisprudence, but the weight given to them in practice has been heavily skewed toward retribution and incapacitation by the dominance of the custodial sentence. The rehabilitative theory, which the Constitution endorses through its dignity and participation provisions, has been the aspirational theory, proclaimed on paper but systematically underfunded in practice. Community service is the first legislative mechanism that takes rehabilitation and reintegration seriously enough to build them into the structure of the sentence itself: the offender does not merely sit out time; he or she actively contributes to the community, thereby both repairing the social harm caused by the offence and rebuilding the social identity damaged by the commission of it.

V. The African and Global Comparative Record

(a) Kenya: A Continental Leader

Kenya has emerged as one of Africa’s most progressive jurisdictions in the adoption of non-custodial sentencing. As of April 2026, over 60,000 offenders in Kenya were serving non-custodial sentences, in a system whose Correctional Services Principal Secretary described as placing ‘communities at the heart of justice.’[16] The Kenyan Criminal Procedure Code provides for community service, probation, restitution, plea bargaining, and forfeiture as alternatives to imprisonment, with a basic legal framework and distinct organisational structure that Ghana’s Bill would do well to emulate in its subsidiary legislation and operational guidelines. Kenya’s experience confirms what advocates have long argued: that community acceptance of and integration with non-custodial sentencing is achievable, and that it produces greater reintegrative outcomes than incarceration for the offence categories to which it applies.

(b) Rwanda: Tradition Repurposed

Rwanda’s post-genocide adoption of the gacaca community court system represents the most dramatic example in African legal history of restorative justice being deployed at scale. Faced with an estimated 120,000 genocide suspects and a destroyed formal justice system, Rwanda created community-based courts that tried cases before the communities in which the offences occurred, emphasising truth-telling, acknowledgment, and community service as forms of reparation.[17] The lessons for Ghana are not simply procedural. They reveal that communities, when trusted with a role in justice delivery, can be both demanding and merciful in ways that state institutions, operating at a remove, cannot replicate.

(c) South Africa: Constitutional Grounding

South Africa’s constitutional order, shaped by Ubuntu and by the transitional justice experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has produced a sentencing jurisprudence that treats community service and correctional supervision as legitimate alternatives to imprisonment and not, as in Ghana’s current system, as exotic exceptions. The Constitutional Court’s invocation of Ubuntu in S v Makwanyane — the death penalty abolition case — as an interpretive principle gave restorative justice a constitutional anchor that influenced the entire subsequent development of South African sentencing law.[18] Ghana’s Article 15 dignity provisions provide a comparable constitutional anchor for a restorative approach; what has been missing is the jurisprudential will to use it.

(d) The UN Tokyo Rules: The International Baseline

Ghana is party to the international framework established by the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Non-Custodial Measures, adopted by the General Assembly in 1990 and known as the Tokyo Rules.[19] The Tokyo Rules establish that non-custodial measures should be used wherever possible and appropriate, that community participation should be encouraged in all stages of the non-custodial sentencing process, and that the primary aim of such measures shall be the social reintegration of the offender with the least possible resort to formal legal procedures. The Community Service Bill, 2026, is, on its face, a belated but welcome alignment of Ghana’s domestic sentencing law with obligations it has formally accepted for over three decades.

VI. A Critical Assessment: The Bill’s Strengths and the Challenges Ahead

(a) What the Bill Gets Right

The Bill’s strengths are real and deserve acknowledgment before the difficulties are catalogued. First, it correctly targets the sentencing range most susceptible to abuse of the custodial option: offences carrying a maximum of three years. At this threshold, the marginal deterrent value of imprisonment over community service is small and the rehabilitative cost of imprisonment is large. The calibration is sound.

Second, the cross-party support for the Bill — evidenced by the Ranking Member of the Committee (representing the opposition NPP) joining the Chairman (NDC) in calling for fast-tracking — is constitutionally significant. Penal reform that commands bipartisan consensus is more likely to produce durable institutional change than reform that is associated with a single administration’s agenda.[20]

Third, the Bill explicitly endorses the restorative justice rationale, framing community service not merely as a sentencing alternative but as a mechanism for community participation in justice delivery. This framing is important: it invites the courts to use the Bill’s provisions generously and purposively, rather than treating community service as a lesser punishment reluctantly offered to offenders who do not quite merit imprisonment.

(b) Implementation: Where Bills Go to Die

The history of criminal justice reform in Ghana is, in part, a history of well-intentioned legislation meeting institutional inertia and expiring quietly. The implementation challenges for the Community Service Bill are specific and foreseeable, and they deserve legislative attention before, not after, the Bill is passed.

The first challenge is supervisory infrastructure. Community service requires a system for assigning offenders to work placements, monitoring attendance and compliance, reporting to the courts, and responding to breaches. Ghana’s probation and social welfare services are already under-resourced. The Committee itself noted the importance of ensuring that the Bill does not create an additional financial burden on the state.[21] The danger is that resource constraints are used as a reason to underinvest in implementation — which would produce the worst of both worlds: a statute on the books and a prison system unchanged in practice.

The second challenge is judicial culture. Community service will only achieve its rehabilitative and restorative potential if the courts use it actively and confidently. In jurisdictions where non-custodial alternatives have been introduced without accompanying sentencing guidelines and judicial training, judges have defaulted to custodial sentences out of habit, caution, or unfamiliarity. The Ghanaian judiciary will require structured guidance — ideally through Practice Directions from the superior courts — on when community service is appropriate, how it is to be calibrated against the gravity of the offence, and how compliance is to be enforced.

The third challenge is community receptivity. Community service requires communities — local authorities, public institutions, civil society organisations — to accept offenders as workers in public spaces. The stigma of conviction is real, and the willingness of communities to participate in the justice process varies considerably. Public education campaigns, coordinated by the Ministry of the Interior in partnership with local government structures, will be essential to making the Bill’s restorative philosophy a lived reality rather than a legislative aspiration.

(c) The Forced Labour Objection

No analysis of community service legislation is complete without addressing the forced labour objection. Article 16(2) of the 1992 Constitution prohibits forced labour, and sceptics have asked whether compulsory unpaid work imposed by the state as a criminal sentence falls within that prohibition.[22] The objection, while not frivolous, does not ultimately succeed. Article 16(3)(a) of the Constitution directly and unambiguously answers it: any labour required as a result of a sentence or order of a court is expressly excluded from the definition of forced labour. That exclusion, standing alone, is conclusive. Article 16(3)(d) provides a further supporting exclusion for labour reasonably required as part of normal communal or civic obligations — a description that community service, directed toward public benefit within the offender’s own community, readily satisfies. Both exclusions align precisely with the exception in Article 2(2)(c) of the ILO Forced Labour Convention (No. 29), ratified by Ghana, which excludes court-ordered work performed under the supervision and control of a public authority. A community service order made by a court, supervised by a state agency, and directed toward work of public benefit satisfies every element of these exclusions. The forced labour objection is answered on the face of the constitutional text.

VII. Conclusion: What the Bill Demands of Us All

There is an Akan proverb: se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi — it is not wrong to go back for what you forgot. Ghana’s criminal justice system forgot something the community long remembered: that the purpose of responding to wrongdoing is not merely to punish but to restore — to restore the victim, to restore the offender to productive community membership, and to restore the social fabric that the offence has frayed. The prison, deployed at scale and without discrimination, forgets all three. The Community Service Bill, 2026, goes back for what has been forgotten.

The Bill is constitutionally grounded: Articles 15 and 14 of the 1992 Constitution demand proportionality and dignity in punishment; Article 35(6)(d) commands community participation in social governance; and the ADR Act, 2010 has already normalised the restorative philosophy in civil disputes. The comparative evidence from Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and the Tokyo Rules is overwhelmingly supportive. The empirical case from Ghana’s own prison statistics is unanswerable: 166% occupancy, a growing population, negligible rehabilitation programming, and the perverse operation of fine default that imprisons poverty rather than crime.

But the Bill will only be as good as its implementation, and the temptation to celebrate its passage and then underfund its execution is a temptation Ghana’s legislature and executive have not always resisted. The courts must use it actively, guided by sentencing principles that treat community service as an affirmative choice and not a consolation. The supervisory infrastructure must be properly resourced, not left to subsist on the margins of an already-stretched probation service. And the communities enlisted as partners in justice must be prepared, respected, and rewarded for the role they are being asked to play.

Africa is watching. A continent on which prisons in the DRC hold ten times their designed capacity, on which Lagos’s Kirikiri prison has become a byword for inhumanity, on which the gap between the criminal law’s aspirations and its practice is measured in human suffering at a scale that statistical summaries cannot convey — that continent needs its democracies to succeed at penal reform, not merely to legislate it. Ghana, which gave the world some of its most eloquent early voices on African jurisprudence and the dignity of the African person, is placed to lead. The Community Service Bill, 2026, is the beginning of that leadership. Whether it becomes its instrument or its epitaph depends on what Ghana does next.

Beyond the cell door lies the community. The question is whether Ghana is ready to trust it.

David Angangmwin Baganiah
Faculty of Law, Pentecost University · [email protected]

Table of Authorities

Constitution and Legislation — Ghana

• Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, 1992, arts 14, 15, 16, 34(2), 35(6)(d), 125(4).
• Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29).
• Criminal and Civil Procedure Code, 1960 (Act 30).
• Alternative Dispute Resolution Act, 2010 (Act 798).
• Community Service Bill, 2026 (laid before Parliament 4 March 2026; Committee report 29 May 2026).

Cases

S v Makwanyane 1995 (3) SA 391 (CC) (South Africa, Constitutional Court).

International Instruments

• United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Non-Custodial Measures (Tokyo Rules), UN Doc A/RES/45/110 (1990).
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966 (ratified by Ghana), arts 10(1) and 10(3).
• ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29) (ratified by Ghana), art 2(2)(c).
• UN Declaration of Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters, ECOSOC Resolution 2002/12.

Books and Articles

• Mensa-Bonsu, H.J.A.N., ‘The Criminal Law of Ghana’ (2nd ed).
• Zehr, H., ‘Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice’ (Herald Press, 1990).
• Gyekye, K., ‘African Cultural Values: An Introduction’ (Sankofa Publishing, 1996).
• Wiredu, K., ‘Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective’ (Indiana University Press, 1996).
• Drumbl, M.A., ‘Atrocity, Punishment and International Law’ (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Baffour, F.D., Francis, A.P., Chong, M.D. and Harris, N., ‘Prison Overcrowding and Harsh Conditions’ (2024) 51(1) Criminal Justice and Behavior 1219.
• Ani, C.C., ‘Restorative Justice and Non-Custodial Measures as Panacea for Prison Decongestion’ in Duruigbo et al (eds), International Law and Development in the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
• Mokgoro, Y., ‘Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa’ (1998) 1 Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 1.
• Llewellyn, J.J. and Howse, R., ‘Restorative Justice: A Conceptual Framework’ (Law Commission of Canada, 1998).

Press and Official Sources

• Ghanaian Times, ‘Parliament urged to expedite passage of Community Service Bill’ (16 April 2026).
• Ghana Business News, ‘Ghana government lays Community Service Bill before Parliament’ (5 March 2026).
• Ministry of the Interior (Ghana), ‘Ghana’s Community Service Bill Aims to Reform Criminal Justice System—Muntaka’ (14 April 2026).
• MyJoyOnline, ‘Ghana to introduce community service sentencing to ease prison overcrowding’ (14 April 2026).
• Capital FM (Kenya), ‘Over 60,000 service non-custodial sentences’ (18 April 2026).

[1]Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, 1992, art 15(1): ‘The dignity of all persons shall be inviolable.’ Art 15(2) prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

[2]Constitution, 1992, arts 15(1), 15(2) and 15(3). Article 15(3) specifically provides that a person who has not been convicted of a criminal offence shall not be treated as a convicted person, which by necessary implication recognises that convicted persons retain residual rights to dignified treatment. See also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), art 10(1): ‘All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.’

[3]Ghana Prisons Service (GPS) Annual Report, 2022: 15,441 inmates in 44 prisons, occupancy rate 166%. GPS (2023): 15,228 inmates. Baffour, Francis, Chong and Harris, ‘Prison Overcrowding and Harsh Conditions: Health and Human Rights Concerns’ (2024) 51(1) Criminal Justice and Behavior 1219. World Prison Brief (2022): Ghana ranks 14th in Africa for prison overcrowding.

[4]Baffour et al (n 3). The phenomenon of fine-defaulters serving custodial sentences is a well-documented driver of prison overcrowding in Ghana and across sub-Saharan Africa.

[5]Ghana Business News (5 March 2026): ‘Ghana government lays Community Service Bill before Parliament’. Parliament of Ghana Facebook page (29 May 2026): Committee report presented by Hon. James Agalga, Chairman of the Committee on Defence and Interior. The Minister of the Interior, Alhaji Muntaka Mohammed-Mubarak, described the initiative as going ‘beyond easing overcrowding’ and seeking to ‘reshape the philosophy of punishment in Ghana’s justice system’: Ghanaian Times (16 April 2026).

[6]Constitution, 1992, arts 15(1) and 15(2). Ghana has also ratified the Convention Against Torture (CAT) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), art 10(3) of which provides that the penitentiary system shall comprise treatment whose essential aim shall be the reformation and social rehabilitation of prisoners.

[7]On proportionality in Ghanaian sentencing see the discussion in Mensa-Bonsu, H.J.A.N., ‘The Criminal Law of Ghana’ (2d ed). The constitutional proportionality principle is reinforced by art 14(1), which requires any deprivation of liberty to be ‘in accordance with’ constitutionally specified grounds and procedures.

[8]Constitution, 1992, art 35(6)(d). Article 34(2) provides that the Directive Principles ‘shall not be enforceable by any court’ but ‘shall be for the guidance of all authorities and citizens in applying or interpreting this Constitution or any other law, and in taking and implementing any policy decisions for the establishment of a just and free society.’ Courts may accordingly draw on the Directive Principles when construing related constitutional provisions touching on community participation and the functions of the state.

[9]Interior Minister Muntaka Mohammed-Mubarak noted that the Bill aims to reduce government spending on feeding and maintaining inmates: allAfrica (15 April 2026). For the broader cost analysis see GPS Annual Reports.

[10]Baffour et al (n 3): ‘many persons charged by the court to pay a fine for their offences end up serving a term of imprisonment due to their inability to pay.’ This observation applies across West Africa and is among the most consistent findings in the comparative non-custodial sentencing literature.

[11]allAfrica (15 April 2026): ‘The Minister said that the proposed law will apply to offences punishable by a prison term of not more than three years, with or without a fine.’

[12]Howard Zehr, ‘Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice’ (Herald Press, 1990), widely credited with the theoretical systematisation of restorative justice. For African applications see Llewellyn, J.J. and Howse, R., ‘Restorative Justice: A Conceptual Framework’ (Law Commission of Canada, 1998). See also the UN Declaration of Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters (ECOSOC Resolution 2002/12).

[13]Gyekye, K., ‘African Cultural Values: An Introduction’ (Sankofa Publishing, 1996); Wiredu, K., ‘Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective’ (Indiana University Press, 1996). On Ubuntu and restorative justice see Mokgoro, Y., ‘Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa’ (1998) 1 Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 1. The South African Constitutional Court has invoked Ubuntu as an interpretive principle in S v Makwanyane 1995 (3) SA 391 (CC) (abolition of the death penalty).

[14]On gacaca in Rwanda and its relationship to restorative justice principles see Drumbl, M.A., ‘Atrocity, Punishment and International Law’ (Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch 3. On Ghanaian traditional dispute resolution see Asante, S.K.B., ‘Law and Society in Ghana’ (1975) 2 Poly Law Review 1.

[15]Alternative Dispute Resolution Act, 2010 (Act 798), ss 1-3 (mediation), ss 19-24 (customary arbitration). The Act reflects the constitutional recognition of alternative dispute resolution in art 125(4) of the 1992 Constitution.

[16]Capital FM (18 April 2026): ‘Over 60,000 service non-custodial sentences.’ Kenya’s approach, notably, includes a partnership with Japan in institutionalising community probation volunteers — a model that Ghana’s implementation framework might consider.

[17]Drumbl (n 9). The gacaca system formally concluded in 2012, having processed approximately 1.9 million cases. Its limitations — including due process concerns — are well-documented, but its demonstration of the scalability of community-based justice is instructive for the Ghanaian context.

[18]S v Makwanyane 1995 (3) SA 391 (CC): the Constitutional Court abolished the death penalty, with Mokgoro J in a separate concurrence explicitly invoking Ubuntu and its emphasis on communal humanity over retributive destruction. The case is the leading African authority for the proposition that criminal justice must respect the relational humanity of the offender.

[19]United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Non-Custodial Measures (the Tokyo Rules), UN Doc A/RES/45/110 (1990). The Rules provide a minimum international standard for non-custodial sentencing, emphasising proportionality, community participation, and rehabilitative purpose.

[20]Ghanaian Times (16 April 2026): both Hon. Agalga (Chairman, NDC) and Rev. Ntim Fordjour (Ranking Member, NPP) ‘called for the bill to be fast-tracked.’

[21]Ghanaian Times (15 April 2026): both the Chairman and Ranking Member ‘stressed the need to ensure that its implementation does not create an additional financial burden on the state.’ This concern, while legitimate, must not be used as a reason to underfund the supervisory infrastructure on which the Bill’s effectiveness will depend.

[22]Constitution, 1992, art 16(2): ‘No person shall be required to perform forced labour.’ Art 16(3)(a) explicitly excludes from that prohibition ‘any labour required as a result of a sentence or order of a court.’ Art 16(3)(d) further excludes ‘any labour reasonably required as part of normal communal or other civic obligations.’ See also the ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), which Ghana has ratified, and whose art 2(2)(c) excludes ‘any work or service exacted from any person as a consequence of a conviction in a court of law, provided that the said work or service is carried out under the supervision and control of a public authority’ from the definition of forced labour.