Ray of light in prison service

The rehabilitation programme in the Golden Grove Women’s Prison continues to be one of the few progressive programmes happening in our society. Three weeks ago, we highlighted the achievement of 20 female prisoners who had obtained passes in CXC and other examinations. Yesterday’s Sunday Newsday carried a feature story on a visit by their children to the women inmates — an occasion of much joy for both the mothers and their children. Specific reforms are also being attempted in the men’s prisons, such as trips outside the prison and educational opportunities. But it makes sense to focus on the women prisoners first, since this provides the opportunity to analyse the bugs in the system before embarking on more ambitious and wide-ranging initiatives.

Junior National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds must be given kudos for overseeing these initiatives, as must the Supervisor of Women’s Prisons, Esther Knights, and Prisons Commissioner John Rougier. While it is likely that the programmes are not running as smoothly as the officials would like us to believe, there can be no faulting the intent behind it. The tendency in our society is to dismiss criminals as beasts in human form, individuals whose evil acts reflect an inherently evil spirit. But a progressive penal approach is one that understands the need to keep criminals from harming society but also understands that criminals are, more often than not, the product of specific social forces.

Without this double-pronged approach to incarceration, a society only worsens its crime problem or, at the very least, does not reduce it. After all, most prisoners do eventually end up back in society and, if they have not learnt their lesson while in prison, are likely to fall back into their old bad ways. Indeed, the recidivism rate is somewhere around 40 percent, and it probably isn’t higher only because many prisoners leave gaol as middle-aged men. But these men and women have ended up in prison precisely because they lacked the capacities to become full-fledged members of the society. It may be that inherent psychological tendencies coupled with the wrong sort of environment made criminality the only available option open to them. Or it may simply be that they had cognitive or other learning difficulties, and the lack of an advanced education system ensured that these individuals never acquired any of the basic skills needed to function in a modern society.

In a very real sense, therefore, prison becomes the last chance for these persons. Many of them who come in young — in their late teens or early 20s — leave after a few years even more hardened and better-informed about the fine points of their “profession.” Ms Knights was indulging in PR when she claimed that it was a falsehood that prison life is “brutal, harsh, and repressive.” It is simply a fact that, for most prisoners, it is indeed so. Indeed, for most inmates, prison life simply confirms for them that the State is the enemy. So part of crime reduction, quite obviously, is for prison authorities to do whatever they can to change the perspective of their charges and to provide them with the opportunity to turn their lives around. This is obviously no easy task, nor even one which can ever expect a hundred percent success rate. Changing the sensibility of those who are likely to commit crimes must happen before the individuals come to prison, and hence must happen in childhood or late teens. But, if the prison authorities can help even two-thirds of those who have reached behind bars, that will surely help change the face of our society.