By Shauna Jemmott

HE’S certainly not likely to win a popularity contest anytime soon, but Deputy Director of Prisons (DDOP), Gladwin Samuels, is convinced the reason he’s so maligned among inmates at the Camp Street jail is because he would have, over time, put the proverbial spoke in their wheel.“Over my 15 years in the prison service, I would have affected what is deemed to be the trade of contraband in prison,” he said.

“Many prisoners thrive off of selling illegal items in prison — cigarettes, narcotics and such items…. So many of them manage to maintain families; many of them managed to pay a lot of fees that are attached to their imprisonment while in there,” Samuels told reporters during a break recently in the ongoing inquiry into the March riots at the Georgetown penitentiary.

Noting that he would have made the most impact during his tenure as Deputy Director of Prisons, Samuels said: “Contraband in prison is basically a multi-million-dollar business. For the two years I spent there as the officer in charge, the record is there to show that I would have removed pounds of marijuana during raids, and thousands of packets of cigarettes were found.

“If you do the mathematics based on the resale value in prison, those prisoners would have lost significant amounts of cash. And all those are reasons that they would not like someone like me around.”

A number of prisoners have openly spoken against the DDOP, saying he is not only cruel, but that he also uses intimidatory tactics to bring them in line. One of his favourite ploys, they say, is to boast that he’s killed before; another is to say that he is “a Mafia”, thereby giving the impression that he is a high-ranking member of the dreaded underworld; perhaps a ‘capo di tutt’i capi’ no less.

But Samuels has neither admitted nor denied those allegations. Rather, he says that all he’s ever tried to do was to make life in prison bearable by ensuring that not only were prisoners treated well, but that staff conducted themselves in a professional manner.

“And as such, if I am constantly putting systems in place to prevent them from carrying out those businesses, more than likely they are gonna be affected,” he said, in obvious reference to his zero tolerance stance on contraband ‘runnings’ at the Camp Street jail.

He claims that the reason prisoners are making all these false charges against him is because they want him to be replaced by “less stringent people, so that they can have their way…”

Samuels said that as far as he’s concerned, before the Commission of Inquiry, he has spoken the truth “in full” about what had transpired on March 3. He’s denied being the one to pass the order to shut the door to the Capital A block, locking prisoners in during a riot on March 3 which claimed the lives of 17 prisoners who were on remand.

He’s also denied giving the order to lock the door. “I did not! I was not there at the beginning of the exercise on March 3,” he said, adding: “Anything that is left to be cleared up will be cleared up by the end of my testimony.”