The sharp increase in prisoners occasioned by increased police activity during the state of emergency (SoE) has introduced more than five hundred inmates to the prisons system out of more than a thousand held by officers. As a first step in meeting this situation, a new prison is in the final stages of construction at Santa Rosa. The facility, a retasked warehouse, will hold 650 persons but can accommodate as many as 1,000. According to Commissioner of Prisons John Rougier, 521 new inmates have been added to the prison system since the start of the SoE, all but two of them-young men who had been charged and, as he put it, now belonged to the prison system. To beef up the complement of prisons officers, 300 were recalled from vacation to improve the supervision and management of the expanded prison system.
Until the new prison facility at Santa Rosa is completed, 243 of the prisoners charged since the start of the SoE have been housed at the underpopulated high-risk prisons unit, which has a capacity of 350 but had previously been host to just 16 prisoners. But jailing accused criminals is only part of the equation of justice, and it has long been an axiom of prison life that prisons that don't emphasise opportunities for self-improvement and personal change return prisoners to society with no capacity to change their patterns of behaviour. Worse than that, petty criminals end up learning about serious crime and more violent patterns of behaviour from more committed criminals behind bars if there isn't some level of intelligent intervention by the prison system in the process. Rougier came in for high praise from Wayne Chance, the founder and president of the prisoner assistance organisation Vision on Mission.
Chance, a former prisoner, is intimately familiar with the process and procedures of the local prisons system and its capacity to breed deeper criminality in inmates. According to Chance, "the greatest improvements the prison system has seen has been under his (Rougier's) administration." The Vision on Mission leader is concerned that the Commissioner's efforts and example have not permeated the prisons service, and with Rougier retiring soon, Chance fears that the prison system will return to what he described as "the beat up approach, the buss head approach," of prisoner punishment and control.
Chance's prisoner rehabilitation project will get a meaningful boost from a Cabinet approved $2.45 million dollar project to establish a centre for ex-prisoners at Wallerfield. Planned for 50 acres of land, the project is expected to provide a training space for prisoners freshly released from incarceration, the critical juncture of resocialisation that has been Vision on Mission's focus. In his announcement of the project, Minister of the People and Social development Glenn Ramadharsingh described the project as a social support project that would remove the "mental guns and psychological artillery" of criminals through a process of rehabilitation.
The Government will also be launching social and training programmes focused on working with antisocial young males in hot-spot communities. Among these anti-crime initiatives will be the $340 million LifeSport Programme focusing on at-risk areas which will seek to engage and financially support as many as 1,800 young men in positive development through sport by 2013. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar travelled to Beetham Gardens on Thursday to announce the Making Life Important programme, billed as "a model for sustainable development and crime prevention" in Beetham Gardens, an effort at forging a new relationship between officers and residents in the area.
On Wednesday, the Government is due to announce the Morvant-Laventille Initiative, a package of community support programmes focused on these hotspot areas. It's always been clear that real change in crime hotspots wouldn't arrive in police vehicles illuminated by flashing lights. That kind of fundamental social change requires open minds and willing hands, continuous engagement and understanding of complex communities and human interactions and real, achievable alternatives to the attractive accessibility of illegal activity. These are welcome engagements in the war on crime.