On Friday, long serving Commissioner of Prisons John Rougier set aside the burdens of his long career in the public service and handed over the leadership of the Trinidad and Tobago prisons system to incoming Commissioner Martin Martinez. Rougier had advice for his successor, some of it a caution to "not be distracted by people who have bitterness. There are bitter people in the service and who are retired," the retiring Prisons Commissioner warned. "Where you are headed there are bitter people, but you have to be strong and focused."
It was a surprisingly strong acknowledgement of the conflicting pressures of his job from the normally evenhanded Commissioner, who had spent much of his career quietly encouraging positive change and rehabilitative measures within prison walls and resisting the enthusiasm of some of his officers for the simpler, more hands-on methods of the past. While there are those officers who might have rejected the retired Commissioner's methods as soft, and there is some room for legitimate concern about the continued availability of drugs and cellular phones to inmates through corrupt channels, which continued throughout Rougier's time in office.
There is no question that the prisons boss' emphasis on then startling ideas such as meaningful rehabilitation and restorative justice proved to be in alignment with best practices for the business of lawful incarceration. It was on Rougier's watch that Wayne Chance's Vision on Mission project had an opportunity to act as a real world waystation for inmates making their first tentative steps back into society. John Rougier was a Prisons Commissioner who kept his door open to new ideas and approaches for ensuring that the institution he described on his departure as "the country's prison" would act not just as a restraint on crime but as an opportunity for those whose choices led them to his care to chart a new course in the world.
If there is anything lamentable about John Rougier's time in office, it was that he never seemed able to gather enough of a groundswell of support within the walls of the prison to be able to make the kinds of changes he hoped for. In preparatory notes made for the first meeting of Security Ministers of the Americas at Montego Bay in March 2008, recidivism was high on the agenda and the rate of offenders returning to prison in Trinidad and Tobago was measured at a shocking 56 per cent. In Barbados, the figure rises to 68 per cent and one out of every three offenders in that country is back in prison within five years of release.
That's a startlingly high number of criminals returning to crime and getting caught again to be housed at the public's expense. And prison remains one of the most expensive ways of dealing with societal aberrations. In the United States, the average cost of housing a prisoner runs to US$11,000 per year despite efforts at managing these costs. It's long been acknowledged that it's far cheaper to educate and train people than it is to keep them locked up. At the ceremony honouring the changing of the guard at the highest level of the Prisons Service, Minister of Justice Herbert Volney announced measures that seemed sympathetic to the goals of the retiring Prisons Commissioner, including a system of early limited release for offenders who exhibit good behaviour and a long overdue revamp of prison rules for the management of prisoners.
Chief Justice Ivor Archie has already announced his interest in testing drug courts for Trinidad and Tobago which would seek to keep minor and first time offenders out of the prisons system by offering them an opportunity to work at beating their drug dependencies and paying retribution to the victims of their crimes. There is more that can and should be brought to the legislative table by the Ministry of Justice to reserve prison sentences for the most hardened of criminals while improving opportunities for restorative justice and personal self-improvement for those found guilty of lesser crimes.
Such measures, supported by suitable legislation, would do much to honour the efforts at reforming the prisons system that the retiring Commissioner pursued and would more fairly shift the burden of criminal redress from the state to the perpetrators of crime.