The cruel, uncaring, indifferent society that never learns

Jul 23, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

If you check the commentators, columnists and letter-writers for all the newspapers since the burning down of the Camp Street prison, without exception, there have been strong critiques of the sentencing structure in the court system.
It took the fiery demolition of the central jail, the burning down of the prison officers’ club opposite the prison, the murder of a warden, the serious injury to another and dangerous escapees roaming, for Guyanese to realize that the sentencing disparities and the injustice that inhere in the court system, are factors that can trigger what happened in the Camp Street jail.
The obvious question is where were these voices all these years when young first offenders were imprisoned for minor offences, when people accused of petty crimes were assigned enormous bail that they could not have afforded, when young men were jailed for the mere possession of a smoking utensil? Where were all these voices when a daily dose of bestial justice was dispensed to poor folks who appeared before the country’s magistrates?
Prisoners rioted and burned down the central jail and suddenly people with doctorates, other kinds of qualifications, people with status, people from civil society, those from the churches are informing us that the justice system and the way it treats the poorer sections of our country, can lead to the kind of things that occurred during the Camp Street jail inferno.
What do you call such a society? The court decision that I thought would outrage the country was when a Berbice magistrate sentenced an 18-year-old girl to six months for going to Suriname with a speedboat without clearing with Guyanese immigration officials. She was charged for leaving Guyana illegally.
That injustice so depressed me at the time that I travelled to Berbice to speak to my friend, attorney and Member of Parliament, Charrandas Persaud, about the case. He said he was not aware of it, but he directed me to certain quarters. That young girl suffered because she refused to give in. I will leave it at that before a libel writ greets me. There was not even a one-paragraph letter in the press condemning what happened to that 18-year-old.
So we are now learning that the justice system can lead to explosive prison revolts. Will the society learn from that mistake? The answer is a resounding no. I see another tragedy waiting to happen. I have cautioned the society about this ignorance several times in these columns. When a baby goes blind, then we will see the outrage. It is about the public cutting of grass. Every month, I see about ten grass-cutters weeding the parapets on the Railway Embankment. Bricks can be seen flying all over the place.
I wrote about the danger it poses to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Bryan Mackintosh read the column and informed me how they do it in Brazil. They put down a large cloth banner for that section of the road and they keep moving it as they go along, thus the flying objects are prevented from reaching passersby. That is so simple a method. We will copy the Brazilians when a piece of broken bottle flies into the eyes of a baby. I want to be cynical and say I hope it misses the innocent baby and hits those that deserve to be hit.
For a year now, two young men who have each lost a leg, stand in the middle of the Railway Embankment at Conversation Tree at the traffic signal soliciting money from drivers when the lights are on red. These two chaps are right in the middle of a crazily busy highway. From the President right down to the most junior minister must have seen this traffic horror that I see daily. From the Commissioner of Police right down to the constable must have seen this crazy thing. Because they are physically challenged, these two men cannot easily move out of the way.
You just know that one day one of these men is going to sustain a terrible injury. My wife got the scare of her life on Friday afternoon. We were going to my aunt’s funeral and had the green light. One of these two gentlemen was in the middle of the road, totally oblivious that we were upon him. I blew and he spun around, but because of a lack of maneuverability he was still in our way. This aberration has been going on for an entire year now. I went to Kitty police station twice. Nothing doing! Nothing, absolutely nothing moves the people of this country.

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