Shas­tri Boodan

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

Prison of­fi­cers are so fear­ful of the crim­i­nal el­e­ment be­hind bars that at least one of them was af­ford­ed the lux­u­ry of a 65-inch TV in his cell, while guns and oth­er con­tra­band items are eas­i­ly traf­ficked in­to the prison sys­tem.

The shock­ing rev­e­la­tion came from De­fence Min­is­ter Wayne Sturge dur­ing a bud­get con­sul­ta­tion at Three Roads, Freeport, on Wednes­day night.

Sturge said the items were dis­cov­ered in­side Build­ing 13 at the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison in Arou­ca, where the high-risk pris­on­ers are housed.

“You would know that there are things that are al­lowed in­to pris­ons il­le­gal­ly. No one is sur­prised about mar­i­jua­na and co­caine and oth­er drugs and so on, and oth­er types of con­tra­band. But I don’t know if you are aware that re­cent­ly, a cou­ple guns were found in prison,” Sturge said.

“That’s a se­ri­ous se­cu­ri­ty risk. But to tell you how far we have de­scend­ed and which is in­dica­tive of how fear­ful prison of­fi­cers are of some of the el­e­ments, there’s a cer­tain pris­on­er, I won’t call his name, a cer­tain pris­on­er who had in his cell in the in­fa­mous Build­ing 13, which is re­served for the worst of the worst, he had in his cell a very large flat screen TV.”

He added, “Now, usu­al­ly when you con­front the pris­ons about how things are go­ing in, they don’t seem to bring any­thing in­to the prison. It’s al­ways drones drop­ping it in. So I don’t know how they dropped in a 65-inch TV.”

Not­ing this was ev­i­dence of the deep en­trench­ment of or­gan­ised net­works be­hind bars, Sturge said, “On the one hand, we may be­lieve that prison of­fi­cers are cor­rupt. On the oth­er hand, there’s an­oth­er dy­nam­ic to it. There are hu­man be­ings and they are sub­ject to the same fears that we have. More so, where they work is where the pris­on­ers live. And it’s not hard to find out where they live and so on. So they are ob­vi­ous­ly fear­ful.”

High­light­ing the scale of the cri­sis, Sturge said six “very dan­ger­ous” in­di­vid­u­als had to be ex­tract­ed from the prison and re­lo­cat­ed dur­ing the cur­rent State of Emer­gency be­cause they could not be prop­er­ly re­strained.

“In or­der to curb that, we had to cut off the head of the snake,” he said.

Yet, even af­ter their ex­trac­tion, he said one of the in­mates re­port­ed­ly is­sued threats to law en­force­ment via a voice note. Sturge said three of the six ex­tract­ed pris­on­ers are lead­ers of gangs op­er­at­ing in San­gre Grande, an area now wit­ness­ing a surge in gang war­fare.

Sturge said the min­istry is con­cerned by a new lev­el of vi­o­lence in that re­gion and across the coun­try, warn­ing that lo­cal gangs are now be­ing ab­sorbed in­to a dan­ger­ous transna­tion­al net­work.

“They them­selves have been in­fil­trat­ed by a group from Venezuela, which is now des­ig­nat­ed as a ter­ror­ist group,” he said.

“Have you all heard of Tren de Aragua? That’s Venezue­lan. I don’t want to call it a car­tel, but they are mer­ce­nar­ies in essence, they op­er­ate on be­half of drug car­tels and they are here. They are in­te­grat­ing with our lo­cals and that’s a very dan­ger­ous thing.”

Tren de Aragua has been linked to arms and drug traf­fick­ing, il­le­gal min­ing, kid­nap­ping, ex­tor­tion, bribery and hu­man smug­gling across Latin Amer­i­ca.

Its re­port­ed pres­ence in T&T, Sturge said, marks a shift in the scale of or­gan­ised crime, and un­der­scores the need for ad­vanced sur­veil­lance and more ag­gres­sive en­force­ment.

PoA boss re­sponds

In an im­me­di­ate re­sponse to Sturge’s claims, Prison Of­fi­cers’ As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Ger­ard Gor­don said his mem­bers were be­ing made scape­goats. He said he was dis­turbed to hear Sturge re­fer to the TV in a pris­on­er’s cell, not­ing this in­ci­dent hap­pened “years ago.”

“Pris­on­ers have sub­mit­ted nu­mer­ous re­quests for ap­pli­ances to the Com­mis­sion­er of Pris­ons. Mr Sturge and they need to do some deep­er dig­ging in­stead of talk­ing about things on the sur­face.”

He said the prison ser­vice is al­so be­ing starved of re­sources.

“We have no work­ing bag­gage scan­ner, there is no work­ing body scan­ner, the on­ly thing we have are our eyes and the nor­mal met­al de­tec­tor wand. We have vis­i­tors that are bring­ing in all kinds of things that we get all the time.”

But he al­so ac­knowl­edged some prison of­fi­cers are traf­fick­ing in con­tra­band. He al­so said be­tween 45 and 50 drones some­times en­ter the air­space over prison fa­cil­i­ties for drop-off of il­le­gal items dai­ly.

Gor­don high­light­ed a se­vere staff short­age, ex­plain­ing that an ad­di­tion­al 1,000 prison of­fi­cers are need­ed to com­ple­ment the ex­ist­ing staff of 3,000.

He said on­ly one-third of the staff are on du­ty at any giv­en time, with even few­er of­fi­cers di­rect­ly in­ter­act­ing with in­mates. He said there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 4,000 in­di­vid­u­als in­car­cer­at­ed at any one time.

Gor­don said the in­fra­struc­ture of the prison sys­tem is age­ing and de­te­ri­o­rat­ing and there is a need for new jails to house in­mates in keep­ing with mod­ern meth­ods of cor­rec­tion.