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Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Criminologist urges Gov’t: Control prison before calling SoE

by

Shane Superville
26 days ago
20250718
Criminologist Dr Randy Seepersad.

Criminologist Dr Randy Seepersad.

COURTESY: DR RANDY SEEPERSAD

Crim­i­nol­o­gist Dr Randy Seep­er­sad says the ef­fec­tive dis­man­tling of or­gan­ised crime net­works be­hind prison walls should take pri­or­i­ty over the in­tro­duc­tion of a na­tion­wide State of Emer­gency (SoE).

Re­fer­ring to in­for­ma­tion from a po­lice me­dia re­lease, which re­port­ed that pris­on­ers were plot­ting to ex­e­cute at­tacks on fig­ures in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, Seep­er­sad said that in­stead of im­ple­ment­ing such a large-scale se­cu­ri­ty re­sponse, the gov­ern­ment, through the prison ser­vice, should have ad­dressed the mat­ter at the prison lev­el.

Re­fer­ring to past con­cerns about in­mates gain­ing ac­cess to mo­bile phones to or­der hits and con­tin­ue con­trol­ling their crim­i­nal em­pires from be­hind bars, he sug­gest­ed that au­thor­i­ties cre­ate a more ro­bust sys­tem to quell such ac­tiv­i­ties be­fore al­low­ing them to es­ca­late to such a se­ri­ous lev­el.

“Try and con­trol the sit­u­a­tion in a set­ting which is al­ready much more cir­cum­scribed and con­trolled, which is the prison set­ting.

“Tack­le the prob­lem with­in the prison and there may not be a need for a State of Emer­gency which af­fects the na­tion as a whole.”

Seep­er­sad rec­om­mend­ed ro­tat­ing pris­on­ers con­sid­ered gang lead­ers or mem­bers from prison to prison on a ran­dom ba­sis to pre­vent or­gan­ised net­works from form­ing be­hind prison walls.

He al­so sug­gest­ed a more thor­ough roll-out of X-ray scan­ners at all pris­ons and ques­tioned the ef­fec­tive­ness of mo­bile phone jam­mers at these fa­cil­i­ties.

“We know there are cell jam­mers with­in some of the pris­ons, but they don’t al­ways work, and the ques­tion is why?

“We need to make those things work with­in the prison ser­vice, and if you have the cell jam­mer net­works ap­pro­pri­ate­ly func­tion­ing, then even if pris­on­ers get their hands on a cell­phone, they won’t be able to make any calls at all.”

Seep­er­sad al­so warned cor­rupt prison of­fi­cers not to be swayed by the promise of mon­ey in ex­change for smug­gling mo­bile phones to pris­on­ers, as it could di­rect­ly lead to their own down­fall or that of those around them.

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