The Gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to close the Car­rera Is­land Prison and the prospect that the prison at Port-of-Spain might al­so be shut down rais­es again the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a long over­due re­think­ing of the coun­try's pris­ons sys­tems.In Oc­to­ber 2011, new­ly ap­point­ed Com­mis­sion­er of Pris­ons Mar­tin Mar­tinez iden­ti­fied the Car­rera and Port-of-Spain pris­ons as in­sti­tu­tions where change was most need­ed.

Mr Mar­tinez com­mit­ted then to bring­ing "dig­ni­ty to the undig­ni­fied." That con­cern fu­els the Pris­ons Com­mis­sion­er's hearty sup­port of the mov­ing of the 300 pris­on­ers at Car­rera to the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison at Arou­ca.Un­for­tu­nate­ly, de­spite the best ef­forts of Mr Mar­tinez and his pre­de­ces­sor John Rougi­er, lo­cal pris­ons re­main in­sti­tu­tions that are far too prone to make crim­i­nals out of any­one un­for­tu­nate enough to be in­car­cer­at­ed.

There re­main sig­nif­i­cant gaps be­tween the in­tent and the re­al­i­ty of re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion for the cit­i­zens locked away be­hind these in­tim­i­dat­ing walls.From pris­ons for chil­dren to the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison at Gold­en Grove, the fo­cus re­mains on the pun­ish­ment and bring­ing to heel of any­one who has been judged guilty of break­ing the law.

It has long been said in col­lo­qui­al par­lance, that "jail not make to ripe fig," but nei­ther was it in­tend­ed to of­fer an ad­vanced crim­i­nal ed­u­ca­tion for the pris­on­ers that tax­pay­ers pay to keep be­hind bars.Since the ap­point­ment of the new Com­mis­sion­er of Pris­ons, the East­ern Cor­rec­tion­al and Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­tre at San­ta Rosa has in­creased the ca­pac­i­ty of pris­ons ac­com­mo­da­tion by 650 cells.

The nar­ra­tive of lo­cal pris­ons isn't on­ly bleak. There have been some suc­cess­es and valu­able ini­tia­tives in­tro­duced over the years, from con­tin­u­ing pris­ons ca­lyp­so com­pe­ti­tions to a plan to in­tro­duce lim­it­ed con­ju­gal vis­its an­nounced in June 2012.There's been noth­ing but com­pli­ments about the in­tro­duc­tion of Rise Max­i­mum Ra­dio, a prison ra­dio project be­gun in 2012 and sup­port­ed by the Min­istry of Jus­tice and the British High Com­mis­sion.

British High Com­mis­sion­er Arthur Snell not­ed that the project is achiev­ing in four months what the UK pris­ons sys­tem took 15 years to do.There is the be­gin­ning of an idea of where pris­ons might go in the 21st cen­tu­ry in Trinidad and To­ba­go. Con­cepts like restora­tive jus­tice have been ten­ta­tive­ly in­tro­duced in­to the pris­ons sys­tem but a bold­er and more fo­cused pro­gramme of prison based re-ed­u­ca­tion of­fered to their cap­tive au­di­ence might serve the in­ter­ests of so­ci­ety bet­ter than rote labour and en­forced idle­ness.

Those "pun­ish­ments," on­ly re­turn to bite us sav­age­ly when pris­on­ers leave jail no bet­ter equipped to par­tic­i­pate in so­ci­ety than they were when they en­tered.The clo­sures an­nounced by the Min­istry of Jus­tice have raised con­cerns about over­crowd­ing on first blush, but once the me­chan­ics of trans­fer­ring the 300 in­mates at Car­rera have been worked out, Jus­tice Min­is­ter Christlyn Moore should move more bold­ly to con­tin­ue the re­mak­ing of the pris­ons sys­tem.

This coun­try will be bet­ter served by re­duc­tions in re­cidi­vism dri­ven by op­por­tu­ni­ties for so­cial­i­sa­tion and choic­es for ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing that po­si­tion pris­on­ers for a pro­duc­tive re­turn to civ­il so­ci­ety.