Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison
Prison in Nigeria

Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison is a prison west of Apapa, Lagos State, Nigeria. It is named after the rural Kirikiri community in which it is situated. A part of the Nigerian Correctional Service, its official capacity is 1,056. It was first established in 1955. Paul Chiama of Leadership wrote that "The mention of Kirikiri first reminds any Nigerian of" this prison.
As of February 1, 1990 its official capacity was 956 but it actually had 1,645 prisoners. A 1995 report by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada stated that it was "already infamous" for its overcrowding. In March 2018, the United Kingdom announced it would spend $939,000 to build a new 112-bed wing, in order to facilitate the transfer of Nigerian prisoners from the UK.
Some death row inmates are held at Kirikiri.
The prison was mentioned in a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode: Rituals (Season 5 Episode 14) as the prison where a child slave trader named Martin Bosa was sent to after he was deported/extradited.
History
Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison was built in the year 1955 with an initial capacity of 1056 inmates.
“Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison” enters the record as prison in Nigeria. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kirikiri, Maximum and Security can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25060214. Authority coordinates are 6.444, 3.308. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1990, 1995 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.