Ramdeen: Treatment of vagrants insulting

AN INSULT to the national conscience. This is how the Catholic Commission for Social Justice (CCSJ) has described the treatment of socially displaced persons, or vagrants, who were “rounded up” from the streets of Port-of-Spain and taken to St Ann’s. In a release yesterday, commission chairman Leela Ramdeen said while it accepted that leaving people on the streets to live was not a mature thing to do, it was also wrong to “round them up and corral” them to facilities without a proper plan. She noted that the vagrant problem has been with us for decades, yet we “still have no infrastructure to deal with it.”

She suggested that a “clearly thought-out, humane strategy based on a medical model for treatment” be adopted. “A one-year programme should be developed, based on sound policy, that will for example, seek to address the needs of between five to ten socially displaced persons per week,” Ramdeen added. Ramdeen also said the programme should be underpinned by a commitment to ensure that there is proper assessment of the needs of each individual to facilitate rehabilitation, reintegration into society and, where possible, reconciliation with their families.

She said persons rounded up were among those who have the most urgent moral claim on the conscience of the nation, and therefore it was “an affront to the national conscience to treat socially displaced persons in the manner in which they have been treated.” “The failure of the State cannot be redeemed by hiding the evidence of that failure by bundling up socially displaced persons as if they are rabid stray animals and hiding them away from the public view,” Ramdeen stated.