Give me a break
to pay almost US$80,000 in restitution for the damage to the penitentiary although repairs cost some US$300,000. Sweat expressed regret for distressing area residents during the duo’s time on the run during which the establishment spent over US$1M a day on the manhunt and investigation.
Ross explained in one interview that his uncle taught him how to “dish it out and take it.” The writer and actor explained, “He was giving me thick skin. That’s what you need to survive in this world.” Minister Ramjattan would certainly agree with that view even if Guyanese are unlikely to be impressed by hard leather.
The Minister could have sought sound advice from the seasoned players of the private infirmary construction and management simulation video game, “Prison Architect” which has sold over 2M units and generated far more than US$25M for the British firm, Introversion Software started by four university mates.
First available as a crowdfunded paid pre-order in 2012, the game has growing multitudes of fans who consider serious questions in chatrooms and discussion groups, ranging from how to deal with menacing escapees digging and using tunnels, to quelling revolts, fostering good behaviour, and launching reform programs to reduce the repeat-offender rate.
Each player takes control of finance, building and running a lockup, and is responsible for handling various aspects of their facility including assembling cells, planning and connecting utilities, and hiring and assigning staff to unlock further aspects of the game.
In a typical exchange, participants acknowledged “prisoners will always start their tunnels from the toilet” and “will only dig at night” in the goal to escape and cause much trouble, so they recommended sealing off access during sleeping hours, using metal detectors to frequently search for banned items and weapons, increasing regular patrols and stationing fierce guard dogs to permanently watch sturdy and expensive perimeter walls.
Taking life a little too literally, a convict believed to be Brazilian attempted a jail escape that surely still stinks. The viral video released on “LiveLeak” in January 2016 captured the wriggling man on camera disappearing headfirst into a filthy communal latrine thought to be in the Sao Paulo area. Unlike the hero’s crawl through a sewer in the “Shawshank Redemption” he ended up stuck in the clogged system and was angrily grabbed by the ankles and hauled out.
Maybe, at the roasting following the next jailbreak the bespectacled, standing Minister and humiliated prison authorities would have corrected their tunnel vision, wiped their faces and fans, and resigned themselves to really learning how to play the game.
ID repeats the joke, “Why is Facebook like jail? You have a profile picture, you sit around all day writing on walls, you get poked by people you really don’t know and when a prisoner takes a mug shot on his smartphone it is called a cellfie.”