Duo in EPIC move to impro of youth in Sophia Detentio

Conceived with the goal of empowering youths who are in trouble with the law, Enhanced Potential to Inspire Change (EPIC)–Guyana, a recently formed non-governmental organization (NGO) is resolute in its efforts to advocate for the reform of juvenile justice system.

EPIC-Guyana was founded earlier this year by Brian Backer and Winston Martindale, who have spent the past months working to enrich the lives of youths housed at the Juvenile Detention Centre at Sophia.

In an interview with Stabroek News last week, Backer said he was known for his work with youth at a community level and he was approached by Commander of ‘A’ Division Clifton Hicken and encouraged to visit the Sophia centre and interact with the adolescents housed there.

Subsequent to his visit, Backer said, he managed to get Martindale involved and everything progressed from that point forward.

They believe the work they are doing would allow them to better advocate for the reform of the juvenile justice system, especially since the Juvenile Offender’s Bill is still in the drafting process.

Currently, they try to visit the centre several times a week to conduct interactive sessions with the youth there with special focus on anger management, conflict resolution, anti-bullying, and anti-suicide, all aimed at prepar- ing them for life after the detention centre.

“It’s about mentoring the kids and setting goals and achieving the goals they set and showing them how to go from where they are to achieving those goals; we want them to know that though they may have made mistakes, it’s not the end of the world,” Backer related.

Just recently, EPIC-Guyana facilitated a visit by local songstress Jackie Jaxx, who engaged the youth in an empowerment session. At the conclusion of the visit, Jaxx accepted an invitation, extended to her by one of the youth at the facility, to return next month for the Christmas social at the centre.

According to Martindale, Jaxx was just one of the several persons they invite periodically to speak to the adolescents, but when there are no guests, the NGO continues to build on the rapport they have established with the youth.

“We have built a unique rapport with the kids there, in the sense that we are not there as authority figures, we are there to engage in normal conversations in which they open up a bit more to us. This allows us to help the administrators with useful information that may come to us, that they may otherwise not be aware of, simply because we are not seen as the system,” Backer stated.

“One of the things we always say is that these kids are not bad kids, they just made bad choices and that is primarily because of a lack of guidance,” he added.

Wandering

The NGO would like to see the abolition of wandering as a juvenile offence.

According to Backer, wandering accounts for the reason a large number of children are detained at the facility, especially the girls.

He went on to say that while some children spend but a few days at the facility, others are left to endure months there, which takes away from their right to an education.

“I have personally met kids there who would have cut school and have gotten locked up for wandering and then school restarts and they can’t go to school because they have been locked up… They can’t go to school because they are locked up for not going to school which makes no sense. They say wandering will be struck off the books, yet still, up to this past week they brought in children for wandering,” Backer said.

He added that a common factor among cases of wandering by girls is the incidence of abuse.

“… They have been abused and so they run from their abusers most times. But in the end, they get penalized for trying to save themselves from the abuse,” the co-founder said.

Meanwhile, Martindale expressed his belief that juveniles should not be locked up for non-violent crimes.

“I find it incredible that kids who are there for wandering, are sharing cells with others who have been accused of committing violent crimes. What happens to the psyche of a kid who is put in that environment? It does irreparable damage in my estimation… There has to be other interventions that the government can exercise to address whatever the issues are,” Martindale said.

“Our society has problems and when these problems hit young people, they have an oversized burden to deal with and some of these acts, crimes that they are locked up for are a culmination of failures from all levels, governmental failures, parenting, community failures and we put all of the responsibility on the child for those failures and what we’re hoping is that paradigm is shifted,” he added.

Backer continued, “We can’t fix juvenile crime if we continue to put wandering in that bracket of crime as the law defines it and that’s because all juvenile crime has some underlying social dysfunction. And unless they address the causes of that dysfunction that will always exist. If you come to me as a doctor with a hole in your leg and I put a BandAid on it, you won’t see the hole but you’ll still have a hole in your leg and that’s basically what the juvenile programme is like.”

First world standard

Looking to the future, the NGO hopes to establish a “first world standard” juvenile facility that would be better equipped to enrich the lives of alleged juvenile offenders if they are required to be institutionalized. f t t

t t t f

r f r i t

t t t t t