Com­mis­sion­er of Pris­ons Ger­ard Wil­son is more con­fi­dent now that the prison ser­vice is well on its way to win­ning the war against the crim­i­nal el­e­ments who con­tin­ue to con­duct their op­er­a­tions from be­hind prison walls.

Ad­mit­ting that the high oc­cur­rence of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty from with­in the pris­ons had be­come a bit over­whelm­ing in re­cent times, par­tic­u­lar­ly when prison of­fi­cers be­came the tar­get, Wil­son said yes­ter­day the re­cent and on­go­ing joint ef­forts of the var­i­ous arms of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty and the in­tel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty were bear­ing fruit. He said with the dif­fer­ent arms of law en­for­cmenet work­ing to­geth­er to clamp down on crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty from be­hind bars, there had been vis­ibe im­prove­ment in the ef­fi­cien­cy of ob­tain­ing the rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion need­ed to en­sure of­fi­cers are safe.

The ser­vice’s ef­forts were boost­ed on Fri­day, when the US Em­bassy, in its con­tin­ued ef­forts to as­sist the T&T Prison ser­vice in ex­e­cut­ing its du­ties, do­nat­ed some equip­ment which was sup­posed to up the abil­i­ty to re­spond to emer­gen­cies and al­so track the crim­i­nal net­works car­ry­ing out op­er­a­tions from be­hind bars. The em­bassy do­nat­ed coun­ter­feit cur­ren­cy de­tec­tion ma­chines, ri­ot gear kits and com­put­er hard­ware.

The do­na­tion was made through the Caribbean Basin Se­cu­ri­ty Ini­tia­tive, util­is­ing fund­ing from the US De­part­ment of State’s Bu­reau of In­ter­na­tion­al Nar­cotics and Law En­force­ment Af­fairs.

In hand­ing over the com­put­er hard­ware, US Am­bas­sador Joseph N Mon­del­lo said it would al­low the prison ser­vice to bet­ter iden­ti­fy and track the crim­i­nal net­works ac­tive in the pris­ons. Mon­del­lo said it was his plea­sure to con­tin­ue their work with the T&T Prison Ser­vice as they sought to pro­mote and main­tain a more ef­fec­tive­ly and ef­fi­cient­ly run prison ser­vice where true re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion could take place.

Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Wil­son said he could not give any fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on this for se­cu­ri­ty rea­sons.

“The ma­chin­ery that is be­ing re­ceived from the US is an area I can­not re­al­ly dis­close be­cause it is a se­cu­ri­ty is­sue and I would not be able to ex­plain what it does. How­ev­er, I am cer­tain it would help in the fight against il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties,” Wil­son said, adding it would help the T&T Prison Ser­vice cre­at­ing a more ef­fec­tive prison sys­tem.

He said the US Em­bassy had been fund­ing sev­er­al train­ing pro­grammes and many prison of­fi­cers had ben­e­fit­ed from them with­in the last two or three years.

Re­cent­ly, he said of­fi­cers at­tend­ed a US De­part­ment of State-spon­sored “Mock Prison Ri­ot” train­ing ex­er­cise in West Vir­ginia, while he re­cent­ly ben­e­fit­ed from a one-month course in Ger­many on ter­ror­ism.

Asked to com­ment on the ac­cu­ra­cy of Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith’s rev­e­la­tion on Fri­day that in­tel­li­gence gath­er­ing had af­firmed at least 50 mur­ders had been con­duct­ed fol­low­ing ‘hits’ sent from the na­tion’s prison, Wil­son said the po­lice ser­vice and oth­er ex­ter­nal se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies/in­tel­li­gen­cies would be bet­ter be pre­pared to an­swer that ques­tion.