THE BLAME GAME has started now that the dust from last week’s Camp Street Prison riot has begun to settle and work begins to get to the bottom of what happened and how it can be avoided.

With 17 prisoners dead during three days of stand-off, it is unarguably the most horrific prison tragedy in recent times. What continues to baffle the citizenry is how the conflict escalated to the proportion it reached with trained and experienced prison officials on the ground.

Naturally, one would have expected that from the first sign of disturbance, prison officers would have shifted into high alert, identify the instigators and separated or transferred them. There would have been a lock down.

From the reports of prison officials, this did not happen. And to compound matters, officials of the prison had reported that the riot started after a raid was conducted and items which the prisoners should not have had were seized.

If this was truly the case, how come the prisoners got matches to set fire in the prison on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, in other words, all three days of the riot, when the prison officers should have been on an ultra-high alert?

Even without an investigation, it is becoming clear that practically every standard operating procedures in maintaining order at the prison was breached, resulting in an avoidable monstrosity.

From a closer look at events in the Camp Street Prison over the past six years, it is evident that the breakdown did not happen overnight, but was the sum total of accumulated negligence in maintenance of proper order at the prison during this time.

In the past six years, along with other incidents, there were four fires — all similar in pattern — the burning of mattresses. They happened in 2010, 2013 and twice in 2015. Perhaps, no wonder, there was a riot in 2016, as the prisoners saw a lax environment and an ideal opportunity to vent their grievances the manner they did.

Speaking at a press briefing on Monday, PPP General Secretary and former Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee laid the blame of the Camp Street debacle at the feet of the Government. He contended that the Granger Administration must look at all the prison locations in the country and not only the Georgetown Prison.

Quite ironically, his statement came a day after the President had made a fact-finding mission to the Mazaruni Prison and spoke about the need for reform of the prison system.

According to Rohee, “The informal, illegal networking among prisoners at the various locations are unimaginable and challenging, consequently they pose serious security risks to the country as a whole were they to be activated in a coordinated manner at the same time. To prevent any re-occurrence of this type the Granger coalition administration must pick up from where the PPP/C left off. The blueprint is there for them to examine carefully and to press ahead with implementation of the Strategic Plan for Prison reform.”

One can hardly question the existence of the blue print to which Mr Rohee referred, but a problem must first be addressed by identifying the source.

The PPP in the last 15 years in power had acquired a notorious reputation for sloth, negligence and poor implementation of recommendations of reports it has commissioned.

A case in point is the report of the Disciplined Forces Commission. The report was submitted by Justice Chang to then Speaker of the National Assembly, Ralph Ramkarran in 2004, but six years after, there was a motion to have it approved.

The report of the commission as it relates to the Prison Service noted the growing size of the prison population, and the need to equally increase security personnel at the prisons. Under Rohee as Home Affairs Minister, both the Mazaruni and Geogetown prisons were understaffed. These two prisons are of noted importance.

The Commission had recommended that in a bid to ease the risk of over-burdening the Georgetown prison with too many high-security prisoners, some of these prisoners be transferred to the more commodious Mazaruni Prison after completion of its physical rehabilitation and structural expansion.

The Georgetown Prison was built to house 600 prisoners but at the time of the riot it had 984. The capital section of the prison has a capacity to hold 68 persons and it is not clear how many were housed there when the rebellion occurred.

The Commission also recommended that prisoners should engage in a constructive regime of activities geared to keep them beneficially occupied. These include learning useful skills such as masonry, carpentry, joinery and agriculture.

In all, 28 recommendations were made for improvements mainly to the Georgetown, Mazaruni and New Amsterdam prisons. It is not clear how many of these recommendations were implemented and from all indications few were taken on board. Besides the Disciplined Forces Commission Report, there were several others done on the Prison Service.

A British team from the International Consultancy Group of the British Government Cabinet Office Centre for Management and Policy Studies in 2001 presented a report to then Home Affairs Minister Ronald Gajraj on prison reform based on a study it had here.

The report found that the criminal justice system did not offer adequate alternatives to incarceration; conditions for staff and prisoners were awful; prisoners’ basic human rights were frequently violated; the Georgetown Prison was worryingly overcrowded and there was little scope for constructive work to help prisoners to reintegrate in society.

It should be pointed out that the Board of Inquiry into the five prison escapees from the Georgetown Prison on February 23, 2002, noted that “The escape in our view could have been avoided if high-profile prisoners [had been] transferred to the Mazaruni Prison.”
In 2009 yet another study was done. This time by a team headed by Lloyd Nickram, a Management Specialist within the then Public Service Ministry.

It found that overcrowding in the prisons was due largely to a large number of remands and convictions for petty crimes. While Rohee spoke about a ‘blue print’ being at the disposal of the Government and it is just for them to adopt, it should be noted that he shunned many of the recommendations for prison reform while he was Home Affairs Minister in the former Government.

The current Administration has quite a lot of work to do and this was acknowledged by President Granger while on the recent fact-finding mission at the Mazaruni Prison.

“Our presence here is not just a gut reaction. It is a plan to ensure that there is a long term strategy.  We are ensuring that the Guyana Prison Service fulfills its mandate.  We have to build a system in which persons who enter this service as inmates would have the best opportunities for rehabilitation and those who are incorrigible…would be prevented from bringing harm to society.”

Mr Granger was also quick to point out that had these changes been made over time, the tragedy that occurred at the Camp Street Prison may not have happened. “What occurred in Georgetown ought not to have occurred had improvements been introduced to the Guyana Prison Service over a period of time…. Some of the measures, which could have corrected or could have prevented the events of last week, were not implemented,” he said.