Sojo Nedd, a 24-year-old mother of four, was sentenced to four years imprisonment last week after she was found guilty of trafficking in marijuana. She was also fined $320,000 – four times the value of the 400g of the marijuana which she had in her possession when she was stopped at a police road block in January two years ago. She told the police at the time of her arrest that she was involved in a “little hustle.”
Viola Sammy, who admitted to having 6g of marijuana in her possession for the purpose of trafficking, was sentenced by the same female magistrate to three years imprisonment and fined $30,000 in May. The woman begged the magistrate for leniency because she had five children – her eldest being 15 years old – to take care of. A repeat offender, she had been convicted on another narcotics matter and released four months ago.
Dianna Ross was sentenced by another female magistrate to four years imprisonment and fined $207,400 after admitting to being in possession of 230.5g of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking in January. She told the magistrate that “Ma hand dey lil tie so I had to do something foh geh lil money.”
The women in these cases did not attempt to dispute their culpability for their offences. Nor can the magistrates’ authority to impose these custodial sentences and monetary fines be denied. The question is whether the punitive male models of imprisonment of vulnerable women is ever likely to rehabilitate the culprits, eradicate trafficking in marijuana or make society safer?
The US Department of State’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Guyana released last March cited the Guyana Prison Service as confirming that there were 88 female inmates in the New Amsterdam Prison where women are usually incarcerated. About thirty per cent of these are usually jailed for trafficking in narcotics, mainly marijuana.
This sad prison is home to some of the most unfortunate prisoners of the war on drugs – mothers and grandmothers – whose first brush with the law on non-violent narcotics charges resulted in their being locked away from their families for three or four years. But, to what good? The US report pointed out that, although the Prison Service offered rehabilitation programmes focused on vocational training and education, such programmes “did not adequately address the needs of prisoners with [a] substance-abuse problem.”
These inmates, many of them young mothers, are not dangerous criminals but often tragic victims of circumstance. Rotting away for three or four years in high-security prisons designed for men is unlikely to solve the women’s marijuana problem. Their sentences are more likely to aggravate the women and their children’s living conditions and to exacerbate their predicament. The chances are that imprisonment will lead to more serious and frequent re-offending on their release. This will trigger a vicious cycle that provokes more social problems than it will improve public safety.
With the petering out of its National Drug Strategy Master Plan last December, the administration should acknowledge that its “war on drugs” has all but failed. It seems now to have degenerated into a war on women, as far as marijuana is concerned.
Ignoring the issue of imprisonment of mothers is costly and not only for the more than $250,000 a year that the state spends to maintain each inmate in prison. A much higher price is paid in the children’s education and upbringing during their mothers’ incarceration and in the shattered families which result.
