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Another prisoner dies

Jul 13, 2008 Editorial

A prisoner died Friday night after a period in hospital. Prisoners are not usually confined to a hospital unless something serious happens. There have been cases of riots in jails, and prisoners have been injured, necessitating periods of hospitalisation.

Sometimes, the prisoners come out on the wrong side of the prison officers, and they also end up in hospital, sometimes nursing broken bones and split heads. In the Camp Street jail, there was at least one case when the authorities had to use deadly force. They actually shot a prisoner dead.

However, despite the overcrowding, those cases are relatively rare in the city, although from time to time prisoners fight and some sustain injuries. Prisoners have also killed each other in jail, leaving people to wonder at the corrective nature of the jails.

That is why we have to take a close look at the case of the prisoner who died Friday night, allegedly from injuries sustained while he was within the prison walls. The official position is garbled. One version is that the prisoner was set upon by others and seriously beaten.

If this were the case, then surely prisoner officers would have seen the fight and would have done everything to break it up. Even if they were too late to protect the prisoner from injury, they would have been in a position to arrest those who would have been among the attackers.

This was not the case; or, at least, no one heard of any confusion within the prison walls, and from information coming from inside those walls, there was no report of a brawl between prisoners. And so we come to the other report, one that suggests that the prisoner was tortured because he was found was a quantity of ammunition.

Some say that the prison officers used brute force to evoke a confession from the prisoner, whom they believed was part of a plan to stage a jailbreak. In 2002, a group of prisoners staged a jailbreak, which spawned a crime wave that still rocks this country.

During that jailbreak, a prison officer was killed and another reduced to little more than a vegetable. That was a brutal jailbreak, and it must still haunt those who have to work within those walls.

It has not escaped notice that, within recent months, the authorities have erected barricades around the prison, and have made the roadway outside the main gate a no traffic zone. The fear of a jailbreak must be real, because there is also the continued presence of armed ranks in and around the prison.

A prisoner is found with a quantity of ammunition, and here we get another version of the events that led to the prisoner’s hospitalisation and subsequent demise. The word is that some prison officers opted to torture the prisoner. They reportedly used boiling water, electric shock and physical violence that left the prisoner suffering from broken bones and burns about his body.

He was taken to hospital and barred from speaking to anyone, particularly his relatives, but he managed to, and told a story of blows and torture. The press got wind of the situation and began to investigate; they were told that the prison authorities were investigating.

The police seemed to be like Pontius Pilate; they washed their hands of the matter by simply saying that the prisoner was brought to them with the marks of violence.

Yesterday, the prison chief said that he was conducting another investigation. We are left to wonder about the outcome of the first investigation, if there was one indeed. Now we hear about an investigation in the wake of the prisoner’s death. Is this a continuation of the first? Or is it a new investigation? Who is conducting this investigation?

It has not escaped notice that the Leader of the Opposition has come out with a call for an independent investigation, and he is correct. A man cannot investigate himself, and this is what seems to be the case within the prison walls.

We already have a report that was supposed to have been produced by the Guyana Defence Force in the wake of torture allegations. That report seems to be a hidden issue because, despite promises, nothing is being eard of the report.

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