The Prison Disturbances and Subsequent Deaths Commission of Inquiry Report has at least established the sequence of events for what happened in the Georgetown Prison on March 3 and the days immediately preceding and following that date. Central to an understanding of what occurred were the testimonies of Fire Chief Marlon Gentle and Fire Prevention Officer Andrew Holder, who described the phenomenon of the ‘flashover’. The technical information that the two officers provided, coupled with evidence about the violence of the inmates in general and those in Capital A Block, in particular, caused the Commissioners to conclude that the prisoners themselves carried most of the responsibility for the tragedy which occurred.
They do not avoid citing the institutional and other failings which either contributed to the climate in which the tragedy took place or represented what one might call its underlying causes, but they do dispel the earlier rumours that prison officers did not try and rescue the burning prisoners. The report did, however, illustrate to the public just how dangerous work in the Prison Service can be.
Having said that, the Commissioners did advert to the fact that “insufficient attention has been paid to the valiant attempts by prisoners in the nearby block to save the trapped prisoners…” This was a reference to Mr Clive Bacchus and a group of about six inmates who broke out of the Old Capital block and tried to rescue their burning colleagues. While he was not mentioned, it might be added that according to testimony given by inmates who survived, Mr Reyon Paddy, who died as a consequence of the fire, did not panic in the burning building but tried to advise some of his comrades, at least, where to place themselves so they might survive.
Overcrowding in the Georgetown jail set the conditions for what happened. However, a great deal is known about this problem and it has been written on ad nauseam, although it has never been addressed in any systematic way. Not surprisingly, therefore, reducing the numbers is a priority recommendation of the report. There were other criticisms too of the conditions in the nation’s premier jail and proposals for their amelioration.
In addition, attention was drawn to the fact that the Guyana Prison Service (GPS) is under strength, and employs far more females as officers than is probably desirable in a violent, macho prison culture. The report does have something to say about the prison sub-culture, and from that it is easy to understand how, given the poor physical conditions, the length of time remand prisoners are incarcerated without trial and the low ratio of prison officers to inmates, a violent gang culture – or proto-gang culture – would evolve. Authority, it should be said, has a psychological basis, and the report says that the prisoners had no respect for authority. Inevitably, therefore, the Commissioners had recommendations on the upgrading of the GPS.
If those were some of the underlying causes mentioned in the report, it also addressed itself to immediate factors, including motivation. Prisoners who testified cited the length of time they had to wait before their cases went to trial, and the Commissioners dealt with this matter at some length, apportioning blame among all the appropriate players, including the lawyers representing clients who had been incarcerated. However, they were probably correct in deciding it was not the trigger factor for the events of March 2 or 3, but more of an underlying motivation and a continuous source of complaint. The proximate cause, they thought, was the search conducted by the Joint Services on March 2 which removed cell phones and marijuana and which produced the riot and fire of that evening, and they adduced testimony in support of this.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were meticulously observed on that occasion, and the fire was extinguished. Six ringleaders were identified, and the intention was to extract them the following morning (March 3) while taking out the inmates of Capital A to search them. It was in the process of trying to remove the third ringleader – Mr Shaka McKenzie – that the real trouble started. He was violent and abusive and then all the prisoners in that section tried to attack the officers with sharpened implements and so an officer locked the door.
The Capital A prisoners broke through to Capital B next door, and started a fire in the gap, which was extinguished by the officers with chemical extinguishers. Unfortunately, according to the report, SOPs were not observed, and the fire service was not called at this point. Had they been, they presumably would have arrived some minutes earlier than they did, although the conclusion of the Commissioners was that this most likely would still not have saved any lives for reasons to which we will return.
A second fire was then lit, which produced thick black smoke, and inmates gave evidence saying they saw fire “crawling” on the walls. They claimed that officers threw tear gas into Capital A, but this appears not to be so; apart from anything else, it has not been in the armoury of the GPS for years. The report does, however, allude to a non-functioning emergency fire pump which has access to 5000 gallons of water and has a capacity of five-minutes’ fire-fighting. A new one has been ordered from abroad it seems, but the prison has no cover at the moment.
The Commissioners called this “disastrous” and blamed the GPS, the Fire Service and the Public Service Ministry for this dereliction. However, if it turns out to be the case that the Prison Service complained about it in a timely fashion to the government, then the ministry should rightfully bear most of the blame.
One can only observe that had this pump been operational and used before the GFS arrived, the outcome could have been quite different, particularly if the fire department had been called at the time the first fire was set. At the level of omissions that directly affected what happened on the day, therefore, the authorities have to accept their own part of the responsibility for the tragedy.
Of course, what the public really wanted to know was why the prisoners could not be brought out to safety. The short answer is the doors would not open. At the time the door was locked on Mr McKenzie and the other inmates of Capital A because they were attacking the officers, the latter could not reopen it because the prisoners had jammed it from the inside. The inmates later unblocked it, but neither the officers nor a civilian mechanic using a cutting tool succeeded in opening it again until the latter started hitting it with a fire extinguisher while an officer tried to turn the key. But by then it was too late.
The report appears to conclude that the tampering with the lock is what the problem was, but since as far as is known no one examined it afterwards, one has to wonder whether the extreme heat also played a role – or even the main role. While the Commissioners did not advert to this, Mr Bacchus testified that he had had water thrown on the lock to cool it. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the commission was in favour of tamper-proof locks.
As stated above, at the bottom of the story was the flashover. Fire Chief Marlon Gentle on the stand referred to the number of highly ignitable materials in the building, including mattresses, among other things.
“As the materials ignite and the heat is generated,” he testified, “they liberate vapours. Those vapours form what is known as fire gases and they’re locked within that ceiling…the embers burn and smoulder and they roll on the ceiling. After then, they have nowhere to go, they flash. That flash raises the temperature of that room to over 1000 degrees in seconds. The continuity of that flash, however, will depend on the amount of combustibles remaining after the vapours would have flashed. And that, in my own experience and training, is what actually happened.”
While it is true that the prisoners have to be held responsible for setting the fires, a flashover is not something that they would have ever heard about before, let alone experienced before – and they were no novices in the setting of fires in jail. It is probably true that most prison officers had never heard of flashovers before March 3 either. In any event, it is safe to say that the inmates did not have immolation as their goal, and had no idea whatever of the danger of what they were doing.
In the end, ensuring there is no repetition lies with the government and a number of other agencies such as the judiciary, that have finally to decide to implement the recommendations of the report, many of which have been made several times before.
