Dear Editor,
Perhaps inspired – and funded – by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and spearheaded by the Attorney-General’s Legal Affairs Ministry, the current “conversations” on alternative sentencing and Penal and Law Reform reveal how insensitive the police and justice systems could be towards those found guilty of crime – major and minor violations.
As the issues of alternative sentencing for petty, non-violent illegal behaviours; the implementation of plea-bargaining probation, parole, pretrial liberty, community service etc are ventilated; and as the long-awaited amendments or reforms to sentencing for marijuana possession take centre-stage I for some strange though “related” reason wish to discuss the prison sentences served by Independence anti-colonial fighter Dr Cheddi Jagan and his American-born wife Janet.
But why this leap from today’s related crime and justice issues to the political imprisonment of the Jagans? Is it not a bit of a stretch? Yes but I might argue that since the Guyanese old folks of the forties to sixties would remind that “jail en mek fuh dogs”, Martin Luther King, Mandela and Cheddi Jagan all could be described as “ex- convicts” and it is not being in jail alone that counts. It’s what the imprisoned does with time served and upon release.
After the first People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government was removed from office by the British in 1953, PPP leader Cheddi was placed under severe “restriction of movement” from February 1954. The local colonial authority feared his then popular policy of civil disobedience. He was charged and jailed for defying his restricted freedom of movement (to Georgetown only.) In court he had moved the impoverished masses with their words: “Today British Guiana is a vast prison. Whether I am outside or inside matters little. Prison holds no terror for me. I expect no justice from this or any other court. Justice has been dead since the British troops landed. I am looking to the day when there will be a greater justice in Guiana.”
Magistrate Sharples sentenced Cheddi Jagan to six months imprisonment with hard labour. That sentence shocked and outraged even conservative opposition in both BG and Britain but Jagan calmly decided how he would use even his imprisonment.
In the Georgetown Jail because of intermittent bouts of tuberculosis he was placed in the prison hospital where he promptly began to “sensitise” numerous fellow-prisoners. During a religious radio series, the “Uplift Hour” the prisoners demanded that Cheddi be allowed to address them. He spoke on the theme “Thou shall not steal” explaining how imperialism and capitalism robbed the poor to enrich the few. Newspapers got hold of his remarks and Cheddi made news on the outside. Inside he organized study groups among the prisoners on the theory and practice of socialism then came hunger strikes against prison conditions which attracted the attention of even the British House of Commons. Cheddi was swiftly removed to her majesty’s Penal settlement – the Mazaruni Jail!
There he and PPP colleagues were isolated from the rest of the prison population but yet he was able to read and propagandise. He learnt carpentry and a little tailoring and was released to jubilant supporters in September 1954.
Meanwhile, his wife equally politically militant, was imprisoned on two false charges just before his own release. Janet Jagan was sentenced to “six (6) months with hard labour.” The Caucasian lady could not “stomach” the New Amsterdam Prison salted fish and vegetables so she survived on bread and tea alone for months.
I repeated the foregoing to illustrate that prison life for two prominent political prisoners (PPP) was deliberately tough even though there were “religious services” and some skills training back then.
Now that the Georgetown Prison was recently burnt flat and that Timehri, Lusignan, New Amsterdam and Mazaruni are all woefully inadequate and understaffed; some by wardens no doubt frequently tempted by circumstances which reward them from both inside and outside, I wonder how much “penitent” rehabilitation can take.
Are there still CXC classes? Psychological counselling? Skills training and steel band and boxing opportunities? The best correctional facility now has to be the new Opportunity Corps Reformatory at Onderneeming for youths until the expanded Mazaruni is completed. The current debate in penal punishment is now welcome. I would love sessions involving the Ministers of Home Affairs and Legal Affairs, with the participation of teachers, pastors, the Commissioner of Police and the very savvy Director of Prisons. Of course the leading Legal Aid programmes are also a must.
Won’t it be fitting irony if this incarnation of the PPP finds it possible to reduce the prison population whilst making jail really habitable, humanitarian and rehabilitative? Unlike when the original leaders, the Jagans, were in jail?
Yours faithfully,
Allan Arthur Fenty
