THE PRISON SITUATION

Jul 19, 2017 Editorial, Features / Columnists

The Georgetown prison was built to house 150 prisoners. By the time it was destroyed it was housing more than 1,000. Sitting in the centre of the city there were many who wanted to see it demolished although there were desperate efforts to increase the accommodation.
Guyana has five prisons. Of the five, the Camp Street prison which was built in 1832 has been the most problematic in rcent times. It was like a huge primitive dormitory which occupied a city block; it was over-crowded, unsafe, filthy and understaffed. These weaknesses were exposed on Sunday July 9, last when the prisoners lit six fires simultaneously.
The upshot was that every wooden building in the prison compound went up in flames.
The others, Mazaruni, built in 1843; New Amsterdam in 1847, Lusignan in 1973 and Timehri in 1983 have far less problems.
Over the years, a series of problems including riots and prisoners beaten to death by mobs have plagued the Camp Street prison, but this was not unique to Camp Street. It happened in New Amsterdam and at Mazaruni but not wth the frequency that such incidents occurred in the city/
Many blame the overcrowding for a lot of the ills in prison. For one there is the propensity of magistrates to sentence more minor offenders to prison and to overindulge in the practice of remand. This aberrant mindset has caused a huge backlog of pretrial prisoners constituting approximately 60 percent of total the Camp Street prison population. Three out of every five prisoners are on remand.
Some of today’s prisoners tend to be more aggressive, violent and irate. They no longer clamber onto the prison roof. The burning of the Camp Street prison was meant to attract the media’s attention to publicize their grievances. Successive governments have been fully aware of the plethora of problems at the prison and have ordered several investigations.
All of reports have basically rehashed what others have said before. They found that the criminal justice system did not offer adequate alternatives to incarceration; conditions for both staff and prisoners were awful; prisoners’ basic human rights were frequently infringed; and there was minimal scope for rehabilitation to help prisoners after their release.
The reports also found that the vast majority of prisoners were frustrated about the day-to-day realities of prison life, poorly prepared meals; beatings by bullies; congested cells; filthy mattresses; intimidation by staff; poor health care and personal hygiene and lack of training. Other perennial problems include the decaying infrastructure; delay in cases which have resulted in large numbers of prisoners being held for long periods and shortage of supervisory staff and prisoners being locked down for excessive periods.
Most of the reports from the investigations were not even made public. Every excuse was used by the last administration to reject the recommendations made by the British in 2006. This government has implemented many of the recommendations in the May 2016 COI report. Recently, the Minister of Public Security explained that there were cases when recommendations could not be implemented because of financial reasons.
Today it is planning to appoint another COI to investigate the destruction of July 9, last.
What is ignored is the fact that some prisoners have mental health problems. They should have been confined to a psychiatric hospital or exposed to perpetual treatment instead of being let loose in a prison compound.
The courts do not take mental illness into the equation when dealing with some convicts with the result there will always be serious problems like the fires and the fights and the murders behind prison walls.

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