In an ef­fort to re­duce the over­crowd­ing of the na­tion’s pris­ons in the midst of the out­break of COVID-19 in T&T, the de­ci­sion by the gov­ern­ment to free pris­on­ers who pose lit­tle dan­ger to the so­ci­ety is a good good one.

It comes as the heads of pris­ons across the Caribbean agreed to the ear­ly re­lease of non-vi­o­lent and sick and el­der­ly in­mates who pose ab­solute­ly no threat to so­ci­ety but on­ly serve to in­crease the con­cen­tra­tion of per­sons in prison.

Hours lat­er Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley al­so made the an­nounce­ment at the Min­istry of Health’s up­date on the virus, say­ing At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi will lat­er work out the de­tails.

The CARI­COM re­lease on the de­ci­sion stat­ed, “Pro­pos­als by prison heads to re­duce COVID-19 in pri­ons at the meet­ing in­clud­ed in­creased screen­ing of staff and pris­on­ers; en­hanced in­for­ma­tion shar­ing among pris­on­ers and the de­vel­op­ment of na­tion­al prison pan­dem­ic plans.”

The rec­om­men­da­tion was made fol­low­ing a meet­ing with heads of cor­rec­tion­al ser­vices and pris­ons last Wednes­day via a video con­fer­enc­ing meet­ing, the re­lease added.

The meet­ing al­so dis­cussed pos­si­ble ways to keep in­mates in touch with their fam­i­lies and loved ones, since vis­i­ta­tion rights have been sus­pend­ed in most coun­tries. The CARI­COM IM­PACS re­lease said to ease this bur­den, com­mu­ni­ca­tion is be­ing fa­cil­i­tat­ed through con­trolled What­sApp and Face Time video calls.

The World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion had for some time now iden­ti­fied pris­ons as a high risk should the COVID-19 get in­to the sys­tem. Its con­ta­gious na­ture, the fact that thou­sands of men are kept in close prox­im­i­ty to each oth­er and the of­ten un­san­i­tary na­ture of pris­ons in the re­gion mul­ti­plies the risk to in­mates should some­one un­for­tu­nate­ly in­tro­duce it to the pe­nal sys­tem.

It is with this in mind, the Gov­ern­ment has to take all rea­son­able mea­sures to re­duce the risk to in­mates be­cause COVID-19 in the prison could, on its own, quick­ly over­whelm the health­care sys­tem.

It is why this news­pa­per ex­pressed our con­dem­na­tion of an in­di­vid­ual who re­turned to the coun­try and with­out ad­her­ing to the self quar­an­tine or­der, de­cid­ed to go to work which al­so re­sult­ed in him in­ter­view­ing the Pris­ons com­mis­sion­er and in­ter­act­ing with oth­er of­fi­cers who would have en­tered the prison to quell a ri­ot.

It ap­pears that al­though the in­di­vid­ual even­tu­al­ly test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19, so far the Pris­ons com­mis­sion­er and pris­on­ers don’t ap­pear to have caught it. It re­minds us how the ir­re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of one per­son could have had dire con­se­quences for a vul­ner­a­ble group.

It al­so rais­es the need for prison re­form which must go hand in hand with crim­i­nal jus­tice re­form.

We need to find a bet­ter way to en­sure that of­fend­ers pay their debt to so­ci­ety and those they have harmed but in seek­ing jus­tice we must en­sure it is even hand­ed.