Prisoner rehabilitation

During the celebration held to observe the 36th anniversary of the Guyana Prison Service, Director of Prisons (ag) Gladwin Samuels gave an address where he said that punishment without rehabilitation condemned an individual to an existence without hope. Recidivism would be the consequence of such hopelessness, he went on to observe, and “a life of crime that will further jeopardize our individual and collective security.”

In a society as violent as ours the public is not always sympathetic to notions of rehabilitation, or supportive of taxpayers’ money being spent on such an approach, more especially those segments whose attitude is coloured by something of a approach. Rehabilitation of any kind takes personnel and money that simply locking people up for the duration doesn’t require. In Britain, many of whose jails have been under severe strain, it is openly acknowledged that while politicians are prepared to pump financial resources into the prisons, it is a hard sell to the voters.

Often the view is that prison is about punishment for a crime committed, and the more draconian the sentence the more likely it is to serve as a deterrent. Clearly one element of sentencing is punishment of a retributive kind at some level, but this is not the same thing as to say that on its own it serves as a deterrent. In fact, the Prisons Director was at pains to point out that several criminology studies had shown that harsher sentences did not necessarily act as deterrents, and may even slightly increase the likelihood of repeat offending.

In contrast, he was reported as telling his audience, social intervention and support together with punishment and encouragement were much more effective in preventing repeat crimes. Without such intervention, someone who had come to the end of their sentence would likely return to a life of crime as their “first option.”

While conditions in the prisons of our neighbours Brazil and Venezuela are notorious, and where frequent risings have produced little improvement, in Guyana more than one government has invested at least in the physical infrastructure of the jails, following riots, breakouts and destruction. The most serious case involved the burning down of a significant part of the Georgetown prison in 2017. In conditions of acute overcrowding, anger and resentment will build, and the buildings which hold wrongdoers have been overcrowded for years because of the glacial pace of the justice system and the sometimes cavalier approach to sentencing on the part of some magistrates.

The current prison population, Mr Samuels said, stands at 1917.

Buildings and living conditions are one thing, however, and the people in them who have been sentenced to a prison term quite another. Director Samuels said that the administration of the Prison Service had embarked on a number of programmes with the support of the Ex-Prison Officers Association and various other bodies. These programmes were designed to rehabilitate and re-integrate “law-breakers.”

We reported him as saying that so far 1074 inmates had been exposed to various forms of training including in academic areas such as CXC Mathematics, Literacy and Numeracy. There had also been vocational instruction in the fields of agriculture, barbering, electrical installation, tailoring and welding, as well as psycho-social guidance in anger management and domestic violence. There was also drama.

Very frankly Mr Samuels admitted that the success of these programmes had been mixed. We quoted him as saying: “While most of the inmates seem to be doing their part, the incontrovertible truth is that, whatever form any initiative takes, it requires the total commitment of all stakeholders for the exercise to be successful.”

While the outcome of such a programme it is true depends in the first instance on the willingness of the inmates to co-operate, it is also dependent on the quality of tuition and the commitment of those undertaking the teaching. Precisely who these teachers are was not stated. One wonders too, just how much instruction in a given subject area the average inmate receives, and how large the classes are. Success will also be partly contingent on those factors as well.

And has the Ministry of National Security allocated funding for meaningful programmes of rehabilitation, or do the prisons have to do as best they can within their existing budgetary arrangements?

In addition, these kinds of classes – on a relatively large scale, if Mr Samuels is to be believed – will also put demands on the prison staff, particularly when their numbers are below par, since monitoring and time-tabling prisoners for these kinds of purposes is far more demanding than just supervising them when they are all locked up in one place.

As it is the Director said there had been a decrease in the number of prison staff this year, and that in addition to the normal attrition rate, 24 had been dismissed for breach of prison rules. Last year there had been 501 staff members, while this year there were 495. While he said that improvement in working conditions was a work in progress, and that there had been budgetary allocations for this, a

corresponding increase in salaries would be appreciated. This is something the public should be prepared to support, since the job is a particularly difficult one, and is not without its dangers, while higher remuneration would be more likely to attract the kind of applicant who could help put into effect a major rehabilitation programme. That said, the head of the service did state that officers continued to receive training both locally and abroad.

From a rehabilitative point of view, the most important section of the prison population are the young offenders. Mr Samuels said that 19% of the total is between the ages of 18 and 30, and 17% of these are incarcerated for drug offences. Many decades ago, when young offenders were held at Timehri, there was an active programme of training undertaken with guidance from the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Development Unit. Those days are long gone, but for obvious reasons it is vital that young people are redirected into a different path, and that they acquire some skills which would allow them the opportunity to make an honest living in outside society. If that is not done, then the risks are high that they might have a long criminal career ahead of them.

Of course as the head of the service pointed out, civil society also has its part to play, a part which it might be mentioned, it has always been hesitant to assume, for obvious reasons.

“Civil society can ease their re-entry by not stigmatizing them [ex-prisoners],” he was quoted as saying, and by “providing opportunities for optimum employment wherever possible. Families will have to provide the necessary support systems so they are not pressured to return to a life of crime.” That is a development which might take a lot longer.

As stated earlier, Director Samuels’ message was that if we want a safer society, then we must move beyond punishment for its own sake, since that alone will not be effective. To help reduce crime we must also include rehabilitation in our prison programmes in order to bring down recidivism. There surely can be little problem with this approach, but one only hopes that the Guyana Prison Service is being provided with the resources, both human and financial, to make it a reality.