SECURITY, NOT OVERCROWDING, WAS THE PROBLEM

Jul 11, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

The prison break and torching of the Georgetown Prisons was not due to overcrowding. It was due to ineffectual security.
There were incidents in the past with prisoners breaking out and climbing on top of the rooftops, but large scale riots on the scale of what happened last March and last Sunday did not occur. In other words, despite the overcrowding, the prison authorities have always been able to keep the prison population in check.
Security was beginning to crack. Law and order was breaking down inside the prisons. Prisoners were having cell phones. They were selling and smoking dope in their cells. A thriving underground economy had developed within the prisons.
Corruption was rampant. The prison authorities were also being fingered in the illegal activities, but evidence was not being garnered to put many of them away behind bars. Corruption is widespread within prisons, and the prisoners know it. Sooner or later that corruption corrodes security.
Last March exposed the crisis in security within the Georgetown Prisons. Adding to the woes of prison security was the demoralization of staff and their fearfulness of going to work. Sunday was a disaster in the making.
The intelligence within the prisons had failed. The authorities are now learning that plans for the prison break were hatched since February. Yet, the prison authorities had no wind of this plot.
Instead of focusing on the need for tightened security within the Prisons, the authorities, after the tragedy of last March, sought refuge in the excuse of overcrowding.
A 1.6 Billion-dollar project was inked with the IDB, and ironically was to have been launched yesterday. The project was aimed at reducing overcrowding by reducing pre-trial detention and by implementing alternative sentencing.
Overcrowding was not the cause of Sunday’s prison break and inferno. Poor security was the real cause. If there was better security that disaster would not have occurred.
It was not as if the entire prison rioted. It was a small group which could not be managed by the prison authorities that led to the conflagration.
Overcrowding has to be addressed. It has been a perennial problem at the Georgetown Prisons. Overcrowding of what is primarily a remand facility has been around for decade. Even though the population is shrinking and investments were made to expand the number of persons which the Prisons can hold, it still cannot keep abreast with the number of persons who are being incarcerated for crimes such as possession and use of narcotics, which was not a major problem four or five decades ago.
Overcrowding will be a perennial problem in the future, unless alternative sentencing is applied more regularly by the courts, and for a greater range of offences. The prisons will continue to burst at the seams, unless dispute settlement mechanisms are applied at the level of the police stations, so that minor offences do not have to reach the courts.
But reducing overcrowding alone is not the answer. We live in a crime-infested country. People seem to steal with compulsion. Even in school, children are stealing from one another. Every week, a potential pickpocket, fraudster or larcenist is born in Guyana. Stealing and defrauding has become a feature of national life. If it were an export, Guyana would not have had a need for oil.
This high level of criminality in the society means that even with measures at alternative sentencing, our prisons will still be bursting at the seams. Guyana’s incarceration rate stands at 256 per 100,000 persons. This is way above the world average of 146 per 100,000 persons.
But even with the overcrowding, the prison authorities were managing. They were under strain, but they were managing.
Things fell apart last March when seventeen persons lost their lives after a prison riot over prisoners’ complaints at not seeing a boxing match. They were so accustomed to having their way that they rioted when it was clear that they would not be able to see boxing.
There was no attempt on that occasion of a prison break. That incident and the subsequent takeover, a few days later, of prisoners of the kitchen of the prisons, should have forewarned the authorities that they were sitting on a ticking time bomb. They should have realized that security at the prisons was razor-thin, and unless it was boosted, the prison was likely to be overrun.
The incident last March exposed the weakness of security at the Prisons. Not only were 17 persons killed in that prison riot but even afterwards the prisoners easily took over the kitchen.
What happened on Sunday was a disaster waiting to happen. Instead of building new prison quarters within that compound, the authorities should have strengthened the security. If the plan was to reduce the prison population, why build a larger facility?

---

---