The powder keg in Camp Street

Feb 07, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

The death of two inmates in the Georgetown Prisons early Friday morning made me realize that the prison is like any other in any part of the world. It is meant to be punitive as well as rehabilitative but in Guyana with its paucity of skilled psychiatrists and other skilled social workers, the prison is more punitive.
I remember getting a phone call shortly before three that morning informing me of the happenings behind those foreboding walls that house more people than should have been there. Two men were killed and they were not shot by the security forces.
Soon after I made contact with a female reporter and this is something that I should write about. This young woman had given birth to her first child a few months ago.
She joined the staff of Kaieteur News about two years ago but she displayed everything that an editor could hope for in a reporter. She was aggressive, meticulous and really loved her work.
If I had my way I would not have asked her to leave her home at that hour of the morning but she insisted. She not only visited the jail, she had the foresight to rush to the Georgetown Public Hospital because by then she had learnt that regardless of whether there are medical practitioners around the authorities would take bodies to the hospital to certify death.
There are others around who would do the same thing but if the truth be told, they are very few, and I have the good fortune to be working with them.
I found out that one of the victims had a history of mental illness, was prone to violence and should therefore have been separated from the general prison population.
I was on the job when the news came that a gunman had attacked the Brickdam Police Station and had shot and killed two policemen and wounded some others.
I saw the evidence of that carnage and I remembered one of the ranks telling me that when the response to the attack came there was a strident call from the then Police Commissioner Winston Felix that the attacker should not be killed. Felix was playing by the book.
Sometime after, I found out that when the man was being taken to court he would refuse to leave the holding cell. This was a clear case of chronic schizophrenia. He needed to be in a mental institution and not the jail. But the question again arises, “Where are our psychiatrists?”
My memory tells me that Dr Frank Beckles was one of the few practicing psychiatrists to examine this patient. On Friday the prison authorities said that the man would take his medication sporadically. This would suggest that even the prison authorities had no control over the patient but they placed him in the general population.
He attacked and killed a murder accused. In turn, other murder accused killed him using a vengeance reserved for animals in a crowded environment.
The man in the street would proclaim that they should have subdued him but these inmates probably recognized the anger he would have posed to them. There was nothing to convince them that he would be permanently separated from them.
In the wake of that episode many people said to me that Solomon Blackman needed to be dead and that the society has been rid of a menace. But would he have been a menace if the state had adequate facilities to cope with patients of his ilk?
The cold hard fact is that Guyana does not pay serious attention to mental illness. Fort Canje Psychiatric Hospital is but a shell of what it should be and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. I lived in Berbice and I watched the deterioration of the various chalets. Many are now nothing but dilapidated buildings.
Depression is rampant in the country but I wonder whether the medical practitioners available can identify much less treat the cases. Those with some knowledge import the necessary drugs without a diagnosis. They see the advertisements on television and they react, perhaps accurately.
But back to the prisons. The prison population is growing but the state seems unwilling to spend money to build additional facilities. The result is that the magistrates keep remanding people to jail to the extent that there is no longer room for people to rest comfortably.
I read somewhere that rats, in a crowded environment, become extremely violent. They kill newborn in what is seen as a means of reducing the population.
And on television, I saw on National Geographic, that sea lions attack and kill the young, again in crowded colonies.
Man becomes extremely violent, like rats, in overcrowded situations. All one has to do is walk in a dense crowd and watch the change in people. Join a crowd trying to get somewhere like the cinema or a show and watch the hooligan behaviour.
Surely the state is not bent on creating violent people, because to the best of my knowledge the last time there was a confrontation with real violence in the society, it was touch and go at one stage and the violent men nearly prevailed.
Something must be done about mental illness and Dr Leslie Ramsammy should not tell me nice words and make comparisons with what was in the past. The Home Affairs Minister, Clement Rohee, must not talk to me about prisons not being designed to be five-star hotels.
Unless these things are addressed what happened inside the Camp Street jail on Friday will become constant occurrences.
And as one prison officer said, “If those men decide that one day they will walk out of the jail, there is nothing to stop them.”

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