By Shauna Jemmott

THE way Roy Jacobs tells it, it’s Newton’s Law in motion down at the Camp Street Jail, where “For every action, there’s an equal but opposite reaction.”

“How a officer attend to a prisoner, that is how I gon attend to you,” Jacobs said.

“If you hush [shout] at me, I gon hush at you, because nobody ain’t get partner in deh; because we are all big people,” he told Commissioner Dale Erskine.

As someone who’s been closely associated with the local penal system, having once served as Director of Prisons, Erskine had asked Jacobs whether he believes prisoners have any respect for their warders.

Jacobs, who first appeared Tuesday before the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the recent riots at the Georgetown Prison, continued yesterday, and under cross-examination by Joint Services Attorney Selwyn Pieters, said remand prisoner Germaine Otto, who died in the fire of March 3, had very good reason not to heed Deputy Director of Prisons Gladwin Samuels’s call to exit the ‘Capital A’ dormitory.

LONG-STANDING FEUD

The witness said Samuels, who had a long-standing feud with Otto, had brandished and cocked a gun just before calling out to the prisoner.

Jacobs said he distinctly heard Otto tell Samuels in reply that he preferred to stay right where he was, as he was afraid for his life.

Jacobs told the commission that Samuels was consistently abusive to prisoners, both verbally and physically, and that inmates in his care responded to him in exactly the same way he approached them.

He said Samuels was also in the habit of telling prisoners that he’d killed before, and by so doing succeeded in driving fear in even some of the most hardened of inmates.

Earlier into the hearing, Jacobs had told Commissioner Merle Mendonca, in response to a question she’d posed,

“Everybody gat fuh fight fuh deh self… We’ve been treated like a hog (pig).”

What the commissioner wanted from the witness was to get a clearer understanding of what he’d meant when he said in his statement about prisoners being victims of “victimisation” and other conditions.

His reply, in essence, was that having to deal with the frustrations of living under all sorts of adverse conditions in a lock-up, only served to bring about additional complications and by extension, “corruption.”

Noting that overcrowding was a major issue, Jacobs told the commission: “One location, 30-something, 80- something person got to use one toilet and yuh got to wait yuh turn… When the prison overcrowded and the officers cannot deal with matters, you will find corruption.”

He also cited victimisation as being another issue, claiming that the one person prisoners fear the most is Samuels, and to a certain extent, “rookie” prison officers.

SEVERAL RUN-INS

Jacobs alleged before the commission that he had had confrontations, more than once, with DDOP Samuels.
On one occasion, he alleged, the officer had brandished a gun in his face and told him that he was “a Mafia”.

Jacobs said the encounter stemmed from an argument he’d had with another prisoner, which escalated into a fist fight, and officers had to intervene.

He said two officers already had the matter under control when Samuels approached him, saying, “You is a bad-boy.”
Jacobs said that in the ensuing argument between he and Samuels, the latter became distinctly menacing. “He tek out his gun and he tell me he is a mafia,” Jacobs said.

When Commissioner Mendonca asked the prisoner what he understood the word “mafia” to mean, his reply was, “A drug lord.”

Reiterating that many of the prisoners feel threatened because the officer’s earlier reputation of having killed a prisoner before and nothing ever coming of the matter, Jacobs said it almost caused a riot back in in 2013.

He said such is the power that Samuels wields, that many times prisoners are afraid to file a complaint against him.

“Samuels is a boss,” he said, meaning that the man was veritably untouchable.

“Nobody looking forward to doing anything… They call you and tek a li’l writing, and when deh done wid yuh, they does push yuh in a corner,” he added.

His several complaints to lawyers and others in similar positions, Jacobs said, were all met with the one advice: “Avoid him!”

LET THEM BURN

Under cross-examination by Attorney at Law Dexter Todd, Jacobs said it was only after Samuels realised that the prisoners were getting out of hand that he passed the order to let them perish.

“Lef dem and leh deh bun,” he quoted Samuels as saying.

Meanwhile, the prisoner said during re-examination by Commission’s Counsel Excellence Dazzell, that during the March 3 fire, the Deputy Director of Prisons was in charge of the operations and “All the power was in his hands.”

While Dazzell said that Samuels being responsible for both officers and prisoners, by ordering an officer to desist from opening the door while the fire blazed could have been thinking of the safety of the officer, the prisoner responded, “If you looking for one person safety and you get 17 in deh, then you ain’t care about that 17.”