What to do about our prison security system
Given President David Granger’s own forthright expressions of concern over issues of public security he is unlikely to give the prevailing prison security regime anything above a dismal report card. The President would concede, we think, that over the three plus years of his own administration the prison security system has simply slipped further into decline even though it has to be said that the events of recent years had been hatched in the festering failure of preceding administrations to try to fix the problems. What else can we conclude from a system that veers wildly from the frightening phenomenon of prison violence, jailbreaks and arson to happenings like the recent, more comical Mother’s Day ‘event’ at the New Amsterdam Prison.
If the many preceding years of ineptitude and inaction that had characterized the running of our prison system are anything to go by, any argument to the effect that last July’s near complete destruction of the Georgetown Prison, the killing of a Prison Officer and the escape of a number of inmates therefrom came as anything even remotely surprising would be an exercise in the most bare-faced hypocrisy. What happened was the outcome of the unfathomable and historic official indifference to the warning signs that had stacked up over the years and to which you can respond by either working diligently to devise remedies or else, to allow to grow worse, through a ‘policy’ of benign indifference, waiting for accidents, disasters in our instance, to happen. We choose the latter option and it has to be said that we have arrived at that juncture towards which we had worked for many years.
One of the characteristics of the behaviour of successive political administrations has been their propensity to proffer remedial measures only after the problem has degenerated into a condition of complete disrepair only to have those evaporate in a problem-solving system driven by little more than a counterproductive firefighting approach. It has been that way with officialdom and our prison system. The emergence of a new problem tends to result in the abandonment of any real focus on remedying the previous problem. One can think of other issues to which this approach applies with equal validity.
Various informed opinions on the successive upheavals at the Georgetown jail have, almost unanimously, attributed those to an absence of uncompromisingly professional management including a chronic absence of official timeliness in moving to remedy specific institutional loopholes, whether these be in the area of violence against inmates, general prisons conditions, bullying or internal gang rivalry. What is underscored here is the reality that governments have always been far more adept at (and seemingly