Prison chief proud no Guyanese in St. Lucia jail

May 15, 2019 News

St Lucia (St. Lucia Times) – Guyana’s Acting Prison Director, Gladwin Samuels, who is currently in Saint Lucia, says he is proud to know that none of

Prison chief, Gladwin Samuels

his countrymen is incarcerated at the Bordelais Correctional Facility (BCF).
“Fortunately, I found out that there are no Guyanese in the prison here,” Samuels said during an interview while visiting the BCF.
“There is a saying that wherever you go you are bound to see a Guyanese,” he stated.
However the visiting Guyana prison official disclosed that of the 504 inmates, he was ‘proud’ that despite the high number of Guyanese living here, there are no Guyanese nationals at the BCF.
“Fortunately for Saint Lucia as well, we currently have in the vicinity of 2,150 prisoners back home and we have no Saint Lucians, so I guess it is a plus for both countries,” Samuels told St Lucia Times.
Currently, 16 foreign nationals are incarcerated at the BCF including three Venezuelans and 12 citizens of countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
“There is the saying that foreign prisoners have the potential to bring new cultures to a prison environment which can result in very aggressive behaviour from the local prison population,” the Guyanese visitor told St Lucia Times.
“So despite our limited resources currently in terms of being able to adequately segregate those prisoners, we do pay attention in terms of preventing that inbreeding or that bad culture from coming into our system,” Samuels told St Lucia Times.
He disclosed that there are a number of foreign nationals in the Guyana prison system.
“We are bordered by Venezuela and Brazil – we have a number of those nationals in our prison. We have persons from the US, Colombia, Cuba – and some of those countries are deemed to have persons who are very bad in terms of their ability to influence others,” the Guyana official observed.
He told St Lucia Times that as a result, Guyana officials are constantly working to ensure that they keep the situation under control.
This was Samuels’s second visit to Saint Lucia.
He revealed that the first time he came here was in 2004 for a British-sponsored training programme.

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