Following recent incidents, prison authorities have increased security for two high profile prisoners, Ministry of Health arson accused Collin Jones and alleged gang leader Tyrone ‘Cobra’ Rowe, Prisons Director Dale Erskine yesterday said.
Erskine confirmed reports that Jones had set fire to his mattress on Tuesday, while saying that it was quickly contained by alert prison officials. As a result of the incident—the second of its kind—Jones, who is deemed a high risk prisoner, was further secured at Georgetown Prisons.
“You would be amazed at some of the resources these prisoners have,” Erskine told Stabroek News, when asked how Jones managed to start the fire.
Erskine added that prisoners “can take two bricks from the yard and rub them together until a flame is started,” while noting that this is as a result of the experience many of them have from living in places such as the interior.
On a daily basis, Erskine added, cigarettes, lighters and even cellular phones are being smuggled into the prison system and as a result officials have to be on a constant watch. Every day new ways are being found to smuggle in the items, he emphasised.
A fire believed to have been started with channa bombs razed the Ministry of Health’s main building and an annex at Brickdam in the wee hours of July 17, 2009. Jones and another suspect, Kurt Thierens, were held but later managed to escape from the Providence Police Station lock-ups. They eluded capture until December, 2010, when Jones was held at Amelia’s Ward, Linden. He later led police to the Kara Kara Creek area, where they found the bodies of two men, later identified as suspected gang members Thierens and Adriano Tracey.
Jones was later charged with a series of offences, including murder, cultivating cannabis, and setting fire to the Supreme Court building. Earlier this year, he was committed to stand trial for the latter offence. During his first court appearance, Jones’ lawyer had requested that he undergo a mental evaluation.
‘One-man cell’
Meanwhile, speaking on Rowe, Erskine said that the prisoner is being isolated from the prison population.
The Kaieteur News had reported last week that Rowe, who is on remand on murder, armed robbery and damage to property charges, was being kept in inhumane conditions in the Georgetown Prisons for the last 23 months. Sometime last week, he had reportedly attacked a prison official with sharp implements.
When asked, Erskine declined to say if Rowe is still at the Georgetown facility or if he had been moved to another facility. He, however, explained that Rowe was being held in a “one man cell” so as to protect not only him but the rest of the prison population as well as for security reasons. He noted that sometimes the prison has to protect a man from himself.
Last Friday, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) said that the Kaieteur News report of the inhumane conditions in which Rowe was being held needed an urgent response. In a statement, it said it believes the newspaper’s description of the “6ft. x 3 ft.” cell in which Rowe was held to be inaccurate, noting that up to 2008, when the time the GHRA came off the Visiting Committee for the prison, no cells in the facility were smaller than 8’ x 8’. Instead, it suggest that he may be in one of the new set of about 12’ x 12 x 15’ (height) cells in a recently constructed ‘capital’ division,’ in which mentally challenged and disruptive prisoners are housed.
“Whether Rowe’s history of violent behaviour and crimes indicate psychiatric problems is unlikely to be properly determined, since an over-worked psychiatrist visits Camp Street prison only on a quarterly basis,” the GHRA, however, noted, while also pointing out that the most senior medical staff attached to the prison is a Medex.
Although regulation 48 of the Prison Act requires the Chief Medical Officer to arrange for a medical officer to visit the prison on a daily basis, the GHRA said the last known Medical Officer to occupy that post was the Police and Prison doctor, who achieved notoriety when examining the teenager with his head covered by a cloth bag after his genitals were set alight by police officers at the Leonora Police station in 2009.
“Those responsible should be held to account. Without excusing the prison administration which clearly has something to explain, the conditions of prisons are a direct result of political factors which are extensively outside of the control of the Guyana Prison Service (GPS),” the GHRA said.
It called for the GPS to be allowed to function professionally, free from political monitoring and interference and their repercussions which undermine GPS performance, in order to sustain the Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners as the non-negotiable yardstick on which prisons should be administered.
It added that while Rowe was reportedly a disruptive influence among prisoners, it was the failure to complete the modernising of the Mazaruni Prison that has left the country with no specialised facility for high-risk prisoners, leaving the already over-crowded and under-staffed central prison to adopt makeshift and inhumane measures to contain them.
Overcrowding
According to the human rights group, overcrowding in the prisons is the most significant factor in the quality of prison life.
It noted that this was a factor controlled to a greater degree by the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Judiciary, the Guyana Police Force, the Parole Board, the Ministry of Health and Human (Probation & Welfare) Services, rather than by the GPS. Further, it said “prolonged delays in trials, numbers remanded to prison, small physical space, and sporadic parole releases” all contribute to undermine prison routines, encourage formation of gangs and overburden an already inadequate staff.
“Overcrowding in Camp Street (and moreso, in the Women’s Prison) is significantly affected by the chaotic approach to drug offenders. Jails are being cluttered with people serving time for possession and supposed trafficking in small quantities of marijuana while, in the meantime, major drug traffickers are treated like princes of the city – untouchables,” it said.
As a result, the GHRA argued that the “single most effective step” to rectifying the situation would be to empower the Prison Service to refuse to take any prisoners beyond the specific number that can be accommodated to the standard minimum conditions on the budget for prisons. “That figure should be publicly available for all to know. Once the number is reached the prisons should have the authority to start to release prisoners beginning with those closest to release date in order to accommodate newcomers,” it said, while pointing out that a similar measure is in effect in some states in the US.
The GHRA also urged the revitalising of Visiting Committees for all prisons. Expertise and resources of the wider community should be mobilised by appointment to the committees of relevant civil society organizations and individuals, it said.
It noted that it resigned from the Visiting Committee of the Georgetown Prison as a result of political interference in the functioning of the Committee. It had cited “the “chilling effect” of having the wife of the current Minister appointed onto the Committee; re-appointment of a businessman as Chair of the Committee who had no understanding of his role nor of the political impartiality required by that post; initiatives of the Chair along with a lawyer on the Committee to collect statistics on the status of appeals of death row prisoners, which were fed to the Minister of Home Affairs to help resuscitate the case for hanging; breaches of prisoner confidentiality and neglect of basic duties of the Committee.”
The GHRA also called for a review of the catalogue of specific reforms generated from the various research, reports and retreats, including the Disciplined Services Commission Report, aimed at reforming prisons. “Clear, rigidly enforced standards, constantly reminding authorities that they are dealing with human beings, are the only countervailing pressure to the ‘dust-bin’ approach to prisons,” it said.
