Kamiti Prison is set to house the first female juvenile jail in Kenya to take in under-age criminals from across the country.

Dubbed Kamae Girls Borstal Institution, the facility in Kiambu will accommodate up to 200 female child offenders at a time, aged between 15 to 17 years.

“Opening the institution has been informed by the changing times which have seen an increase in crimes by juvenile female offenders,” said the Superintendent of Prisons Fairbrain Ombeva in an interview.

Kamae Girls Borstal Institution becomes the third such institution to be opened in the country after Shimo La Tewa Borstal Institution in Mombasa and Shikutsa Borstal Institution in Kakamega, both holding boys.

The maximum term the juveniles can serve at the facilities is three years during which they are corrected, educated and taken through vocational training.

Ms Ombeva said the intention for separating adult and child offenders was to ensure that detaining them did not turn them into more hardcore criminals.

“We want to be sure that we are reforming these youngsters instead of contaminating them,” she said.

The institutions are part of the penal system of Kenya and are administered by the Prisons Department. This makes them different from other custodial institutions housing children that are managed by the Department of Children’s Services.

In 1963, the country’s first Parliament enacted a Borstal Institutions Act Chapter 92 to provide for detention of youthful offenders.

The Act accords the Interior Secretary powers to establish borstal institutions and also directs that female inmates be kept separate from their male counterparts.

Construction of Shikutsa Borstal Institution was started by the colonial government in 1952 and opened its doors to its first offender in 1963.

In September 1965, Shimo La Tewa Borstal Institution which has capacity of about 320 inmates was opened to serve as an overflow for Shikutsa.