Ex-inmate alleges brutality and corruption at YTC

An ex-inmate of the Youth Training Centre at Arouca is calling on the revelant authorities to investigate the level of corruption and brutality going on within the juvenile centre.

One day after being released from YTC, having served one year for fraud, 19-year-old Akile Simon, came to Newsday’s South Bureau last Thursday, armed with a diary detailing incidents where he was mistreated and brutalised by senior and junior officers. Simon recalled an incident on Wednesday April 23 when two of the inmates escaped through emergency doors at the back of their dormitory which houses 14 inmates. Simon also stays in that particular dormitory but did not sleep there that night. He said the escapees had possession of two keys which had been reported missing from the administration building.

Simon related that following the escape, he and the other 11 inmates of that dormitory were badly beaten with batons and bamboo whips, kicked and cuffed about the body by officers who demanded to know where the keys were hidden. The following morning, under the supervision of a senior officials, the officers conducted a search in all the dormitories but turned up empty handed. Simon said the officers then placed them in the “disassociation cell” which is used as a form of punishment. Sometime later the inmates were taken to the gymnasium where they were individually questioned and beaten by the officers. Simon said while he was in the cell, he overheard one of the inmates revealing the location of the keys. When it was his turn to be questioned, Simon told the officers he was told that the keys were in a brick wall of the dormitory. But this did not stop the beating, according to Simon.

“About 30 officers slapped, kicked, cuffed us and beat us with baton, bamboo whips and sapodilla whips. It went on for almost an hour. You cannot even bawl or else you would get more licks,” the young man recalled. The 12 inmates, he said, were taken for medical treatment at YTC’s infirmatory. “My buttocks was waled, cut and swollen. I could not sit on it for a while and even now it hurts sometimes when I sit. I could not hear properly in my ears,” he added. Simon said he and the other inmates were returned to the disassociation cell, where the officers again put a sound beating on them. The next day (Friday), the former inmate said, he was taken to the supervisor’s office where he was forced to sign a statement confessing that he knew about the escape and whereabouts of the key. Simon claimed when he refused to sign the document, an officer struck him with a piece of wood. Simon said the supervisor then took a generator pole, known among inmates as the “yellow man”, which he used to beat him into signing the statement. Simon said his fellow inmates spent five days in the cell but he only came out when he was discharged from YTC on Wednesday.