Sascha Wil­son

Due to over­crowd­ing in the pris­ons, peo­ple charged with mi­nor of­fences are mixed with sea­soned crim­i­nals and some­times re­cruit­ed in­to gangs, says re­tired Pris­ons Com­mis­sion­er Ger­ard Wil­son. How­ev­er, he said the is­sue of gang mush­room­ing is a so­cioe­co­nom­ic prob­lem that re­quires a col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach.

Speak­ing on CNC 3’s Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme yes­ter­day, Wil­son said last Feb­ru­ary when he re­tired from the ser­vice there were nine or ten gangs. Not­ing that Prison Com­mis­sion­er Den­nis Pul­chan said there now ex­its 17 gangs, he said, “You have a per­son com­ing in for a mi­nor of­fence but be­cause of the over­crowd­ing you have to place them in a cell with per­sons who are sea­soned. They may ask him the ques­tion ‘what you come for,’ he may say prob­a­bly ‘I stole a gas tank. I broke in­to a house or I stole a com­put­er and they may tell him ‘boy look come and make fast mon­ey when you come out.’”

He said they may give him the name and ad­dress of some­one they could con­tact when they are re­leased to join the gang.

“So the re­cruit­ment is al­so with­in the wall so if we don’t have prop­er clas­si­fi­ca­tion, if we don’t keep those first-timers away from the sea­soned crim­i­nals then we spin­ning top in mud.”

Wil­son said the is­sue is that gang life is at­trac­tive to young peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in de­pressed com­mu­ni­ties.

“In my view, it is a so­cioe­co­nom­ic fac­tor when we look at par­tic­u­lar­ly de­pressed com­mu­ni­ties and we look at crime and the fact that for the young per­sons, per­sons who are com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers they dri­ve the best cars, they wear the best clothes and they have the girls. When they look at that, these peo­ple are more like men­tors to them. It’s at­trac­tive.” Dis­miss­ing as un­true the per­cep­tion that youths of a par­tic­u­lar eth­nic group were in­volved in gangs, Wil­son said his ex­pe­ri­ence dur­ing his 37 years in the prison ser­vice has been that youths from both the African and East In­di­an eth­nic­i­ty were in­volved in gangs.

“And it is al­most the same be­cause they come from the same back­ground.” He said more at­ten­tion has to be paid to hun­dreds of stu­dents, par­tic­u­lar­ly male stu­dents when they leave sec­ondary school.