An insider’s perspective on corruption in prison

Jan 04, 2021 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

Prison is a business, at Lusignan Prison which is located at Lusignan on the East Coast of Demerara after the golf course is a person’s worse nightmare. It has a pig farm, vegetable farm, isolation section which criminals referred to as the ‘kitchen cat section’ also known as soft jail, and finally the holding bays one, two, three and four also known as ‘Jurassic World’ where any and everything is possible. Many times I have seen prisoners being moved from my section to Jurassic World and they would return two to three days later wounded and slim like if they went through some battle that caused them to suffer tremendously.
You can get any and everything in prison, from marijuana to cigarettes to knives to cutlasses to alcohol to cell phones for the right price. It cost $2,500 to smuggle a pack of cigarettes, $11,000 for a normal cellphone, a smart phone will cost more. There is a price for everything, a kitchen staff who is a prisoner smuggled four pounds of marijuana into the prison with the help of an officer through a process called pouching. If a prisoner’s cellphone is seized he must pay to get it back, if a prisoner wants to make a call from a prisoner’s cellphone he will call his family and ask them to call back, he will have his family send $500 credit to that number in some cases as much as $1,000. Many prisoners are bullied and threaten to do this. In some cases they are threaten to call their families to pay money to the TUC shop in a certain name. Countless prisoners have weapons which they walk around with even in front of officers, I remember one prisoner boldly saying that he got permission from the OC to have the weapon on him at all times, it must be true since no officer even said anything to him about it. Enough credit can guarantee the purchase of a joint to smoke which is neatly packaged in a tiny zip lock bag. Each night a large percentage of the prisoners in my section would smoke marijuana, I have seen prisoners smoke it in the presence of the officers with no repercussion.
One can barter in prison, a 1.5 litre bottle of tropical mist water can be traded for one cigarette, and a 2 litre soda can be traded for a joint. Many prison officers are involved in the sale of marijuana and the smuggling of items in the prison. I have seen prison officers passing marijuana to the high-ranking prisoners, there is a hierarchy among them which the officers are aware of. This corruption occurs mainly below the senior rank. The officers treat prisoners like animals, they are more concern about the business of making money rather than maintaining order.
The smuggling starts from the TUC shop with the officers there and the prisoners who wear blue uniform who work to reduce their sentence. From there, the items depending on what it is moves to the kitchen staff who are prisoners to the prisoners who it is intended for, there is a cost attached obviously, in most cases one joint.
The other aspect of business in the prison is the stealing of meat, food is cooked with little or no meat for the prisoners, on several occasions split peas cook was cooked, each prisoner was given one cup of rice, nine out of ten prisoners got no meat and the one that received a piece, the dimensions were 0.25 inch by 0.25 inch. Due to the hierarchy in the prison, food is not distributed in an equitable way, there are prisoners who would get as much as four times more food and meat than others. This seems to be the acceptable norm. I was informed that the reason for the shortage in meat and cheese spread is because the Wardens aka officers take the best for themselves and their families, then the kitchen staff who are the prisoners would take for themselves and a quantity to trade for marijuana and prisoners get what remains.
The saying among prison officers is that: “THIS IS PRISON, YOU WILL TEK WHAT WE GIVE YOU OR DO WITHOUT”.
This is only the tip of the iceberg.

An Insider

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An insider’s perspective on corruption in prison

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