THE breakout from the Lusignan ‘holding’ prison of 13 prisoners is alarming, coming at a time when the authorities have been working around-the-clock to secure the 1,000 – odd inmates who were dislocated as a result of the July 9 fires at the Camp Street jail.

The escapees are all considered as deadly and dangerous, most of whom have been awaiting trial on charges of murder and offences in which guns were involved. From information released, the police revealed that the escapees had dug a tunnel in the toilet area of the Lusignan facility, which was used for the location of the Camp Street prisoners, all of whom survived the fires that razed the age-old prisons. One prison warden was shot and killed.

There has been prevailing unrests in Guyana’s prisons for many years, due mainly to over-crowding and inadequate diets. In February 2002, a prison break resulted in several dangerous criminals running amok. They wreaked havoc by killing, robbing and otherwise committing some of the most despicable crimes of this century. In the deadly melee, the escapees were all killed but not after some 400 persons were slaughtered. The then government had blamed the killings on shootouts among drug gangs and an armed insurgency.

In the aftermath of that crime spree, a Government Minister was assassinated and brutal massacres were committed by a sadistic gang in such places as Lusignan and Bartica. In March 2016, fresh ferment erupted in the central Georgetown jail, resulting in the criminal convict masterminds engineering a fire that took the lives of 17 prisoners.

Since then, periodic sweeps of the facilities have unearthed guns, knives and an assortment of other deadly weapons, together with cellphones. On July 9, 2017 prisoners did a copycat operation, this time razing the prison in an inferno. The entire prison population of over 1,000 inmates were unhurt, but eight of them escaped. Since then, four were captured or accounted for, leaving four on the run.

Then came the Lusignan break-out, when measures were being completed to remove the prisoners considered dangerous to a secured location in the old Camp Street jail. This is a testing time for our security forces, under whose watch this new break-out took place. The challenge now is to secure the Lusignan as well as other prisons, and to intensify the hunt for the 17 escapees all of whom are considered to be extremely dangerous.

This is the time for the state to re-affirm its ownership of the process to ensure public safety, and this newspaper fully backs our Government and the joint services in taking whatever measures are necessary to bring this situation back to some level of normalacy. All Guyanese who do not wish to see a return to the episodes of barbaric crimes, must rally behind our security forces in what has been described as Operation Cleansweep.
As we have said before, this is not the time to seek political mileage and to engage in finger-pointing, given the seriousness of the issue and the importance of presenting a united front in the face of what is clearly a threat to law and order. The acts by those inmates to subvert this, placing the lives of their fellow inmates, the prison officers, compound, and the wider society at risk, call for sober reflection. Crime hurts society, and for citizens what happened at Lusignan it is important that it be handled judiciously and the nation does not see a repeat of the 2002-2006 criminal mayhem.