Joseph Maina had never seen an elephant up close before. The first time he looked into the eyes of one of Africa's giants, he was hacking off its tusks with an axe. The elephant was dead and he was ripping it apart to obtain ivory. He had been paid 500 Kenyan shillings, or a little over £3.50 for the work – twice his normal daily income.

The 47-year-old casual worker is now in a medium security prison. Unlike the majority of poachers who kill African elephants and leave them to rot in the bush, he was arrested the next day. The father of six is serving four and a half years inside Naivasha Prison. He wears a black and white striped uniform and sleeps with up to 80 otherconvicts on mattresses on the floor. He is one of around 800 inmates. He never thought he would end up here.

Statistically, he is unlucky. The poaching epidemic is now an internationally recognised crisis. More than 100 African elephants are killed every day and in 2011 alone, almost 12 per cent of the population was destroyed. But despite the fact that Kenya's elephant population has plummeted from around 167,000 to 35,000 in less than four decades, prosecution rates for wildlife crimes are shockingly low.

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Around 2,000 people in Kenya are arrested every year for offences linked to poaching and trafficking, according to a study by conservation charity WildlifeDirect, which analysed records from around 15 courts in the