Mere ministerial whinge won’t change anything

NOT ONLY does Delroy Chuck belabour the obvious, but pretends as an officious bystander who has just discovered someone’s unfulfilled obligation, which he intends to set right.

“A solution needs to be found, but at the moment one is not emerging,” Mr Chuck told this newspaper last week. “But it is something that the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of National Security and the Ministry of Justice have to solve as quickly as possible.”

For anyone who might not know, Delroy Chuck is a member of the Jamaican Government with responsibility, for more than four years, for the last named ministry. In an earlier administration, between 2007 and 2011, he was Speaker of the island’s Parliament. He is also a lawyer of decades standing.

What makes this background important is the issue on which Mr Chuck commented to The Gleaner: the death in prison in January of emaciated and bugbitten 81-year-old Noel Chambers, incarcerated for 40 years without being tried for the murder he was accused of committing.

Mr Chambers was among the kinds of people in the prison system, who, a year ago, we characterised as being “in a sort of judicial purgatory without any clear prospects of expiation”. Mostly, there are defendants, who, because of mental incapacity, are deemed unfit to plead and were remanded “at the pleasure of the court”.

The Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM), the agency which investigates allegations of abuse by the security forces, including prison warders, recently unearthed Mr Chambers’ case. It says there are 146 similar cases in the system, including at least 15 in which the inmates have been in jail for more than 30 years.

It is widely agreed that for people with mental illnesses, Jamaica’s prison is hardly the best place.

Indeed, Jamaica’s Criminal Justice (Administration) Act allows judges to order defendants who are unfit to plead to be “admitted, at the court’s pleasure, to a psychiatric facility” with directions for their “supervision and treatment”. These defendants may also be released to the guardianship of another individual, but social circumstances limit the use of this provision, although experts generally promote the efficacy of community treatment for mental health patients.

Jamaica’s prisons have no mental health facilities, or hospital annexes. Further, the Jamaican government in 2017 rejected Britain’s offer to help finance a modern prison, saying that it disagreed with the terms of the offer. The island has a single mental health hospital, Bellevue, in Kingston, where, according to Mr Chuck, the people who tend to get lost in the prison system “should be”.

“Bellevue … resists taking these persons because they feel they don’t have the facilities or personnel to properly deal with them,” said the justice minister. So now Mr Chuck, in the face of the national outrage of Mr Chambers’ case, sees the need for an urgent solution.

Except that a 2006 amendment to the law, requiring the head of the prison system to make monthly reports on persons who are unfit to plead, came against the backdrop of outcries for prisoners falling through the cracks. At the time, Mr Chuck was the shadow justice minister.

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There have been several other reports of similar occurrences in the decade and half since those amendments, including the one last year when Walter Blackstock, arrested for murder 31 years earlier, but never tried because of diminished mental capacity, was released. Mr Chuck was the minister of justice.

The time is long past for talking about doing better for mentally ill prisoners, whether on remand or convicted. Just do it.

Making the appropriate adjustment to Bellevue, rather than engaging in a tail-wagging-the-dog whinge, can’t be so expensive as to be beyond the capacity of any government that is serious about human rights, and the proper care of vulnerable people. The one of which Mr Chuck is a member says it is.

Of course, it is not only the current administration that has talked up a storm, yet failed vulnerable prisoners. In 2014, when the People’s National Party was in office, Stewart Saunders, the then permanent secretary in the national security ministry, was equally repentant about the treatment, or the lack thereof, of mentally ill people in prisons.

“(It) is not acceptable in any way, shape or form,” he said. His minister, Peter Bunting, agreed.

It still isn’t. But mere ministerial hand-wringing won’t change a thing.