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JULY 24, two days from today, will mark ten years since a brazen jailbreak occurred at the Port of Spain prison. That stunning breach was, at the time, the most dramatic sign of the need for penal reform. One decade later, it has been eclipsed. Top cop Allister Guevarro last week recommended a state of emergency because of “a co-ordinated and highly dangerous criminal network operating from within correctional facilities.” While in 2015 the breach was quickly contained, in the year 2025 the entire country has been brought to its knees. So much for progress. The system hurtles towards collapse.
Politicians have little incentive to improve jails. They are expensive, with $700 million allocated to the prison service this year alone.
Additionally, crime places pressure on parties to appear tough; to throw more people behind bars; to deny bail; to add new offences. The emergency has given authorities the power to disrupt networks by plucking prisoners out. But it will add far more than it removes. The last SoE saw 4,000 people arrested.
Even before the 2015 jailbreak, a watershed constitutional case in 2008 laid bare appalling physical conditions, with the court deeming the facility in the capital city a “hellhole.”
The case confirmed that far from pursuing restorative justice, as recommended by the 2002 Baptiste Task Force Report on Prison Reform and Transformation, the state has been allowing prisons to fall into such disrepair they amount to cruel and unusual punishment. With thousands of committals per year, the overcrowding is scandalous. Instead of rehabilitation, a vicious cycle of recidivism results.
Today, authorities have acted given a threat to “senior officials and national institutions.” But for years, prison officers have succumbed to hits and are begging for guns. Prisoners, too, have been abused. In March, one died. Even before the arrival of sophisticated intelligence, this pressure-pot situation was diagnosable by the fact that there are just 2,500 officers but almost twice as many prisoners.
Despairingly, no one was held accountable for the Frederick Street jailbreak, which claimed the life of PC Sherman Maynard. Officials were suspended then reinstated. A preliminary report vanished, while the final report is unpublished. Connect the dots between 2015 and 2025.
Last year, the PNM slashed prison service funding by $109 million in the budget. But the SoE is proof that Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and her defence minister Wayne Sturge cannot afford to do something similar.
They must drastically improve the prison estate and prioritise rehabilitation and non-custodial punishment. They would do well to heed the words of Nelson Mandela, who once said, “Prisons are essential to making our justice system an effective weapon in the fight against crime.”
Jails are not just jails. They are key to ending violence.
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