These ideas, however, incorporated into policies, often never get beyond the official files. Such a situation is due to a variety of reasons: problems of underdevelopment in terms of human and financial resources; lack of interest and property accumulation; the desire to do nothing beyond 'paper prescriptions' about problems that confront the lower socio-economic members of the society. The Nigerian prisons system and its penal policy provide an illustration of just these problems. The penal policy of reformation-rehabilitation in Nigeria is no more than a public disguise for 'modernizing' while in practice nothing has changed from the inherited penal system that was geared towards the punishment, incapacitation, and deprivation of incarcerated offenders. This paper argues that in spite of official declarations that the Nigerian Prisons Service goals have shifted to reformation and rehabilitation, nothing has been done in any meaningful way to change the operations and organizations of the service to fulfill such goals. Although skeptical of the possibility of reforming and rehabilitating offenders without a restructure of the systems of social inequality within which criminality (both in act and labeling) flourishes; the author argues that the minimal condition for a claim to individual offender treatment (reformation-rehabilitation) is a guarantee that the incarcerated returns to the society better able to live a normal and meaningful life than he was before his imprisonment. The author contends that the operations and expenditures of the Nigerian prisons system and penal policy benefit prison food contractors and top bureaucrats than the inmates and Nigerian society at large. (Publisher abstract)