Rights of Indigenous prisoners most violated –CoI report
Prisoners protesting during a riot at the Georgetown Prisons on March 3, 2016
Prisoners protesting during a riot at the Georgetown Prisons on March 3, 2016

THE Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the death of 17 inmates at the Georgetown Prisons has found that Indigenous people constitute the population group whose rights are most violated by the prison system.The CoI listed Indigenous people, female offenders, mentally ill prisoners, those with HIV, and children as the most vulnerable groups within the prison system.

The CoI report, which was recently handed over to President David Granger, found that in addition to the general inhumane conditions to which all detainees are exposed at prisons, Indigenous people suffer a range of additional hardships:
They are separated completely from their families and communities, and suffer longer delays in their trials.

“Prison diet never includes food to which they are accustomed. Indigenous people by nature are less assertive or aggressive than other population groups. They endure far longer delays in trials due to the unreliability of interior courts. In many cases, a poor command of English isolates Indigenous prisoners almost completely from life around them,” the CoI report said.

The report noted that application of this harsh system towards Indigenous people is almost totally ignored by the administration of justice, the Parole Board, and the political administration.

The report also found that the great majority of female prisoners do not constitute a threat to society: “However, the way society deals with women is simply an extension of what is considered appropriate for men.

“When a policy turns out to be inappropriate for men, it is usually disastrous for women, which is clearly the case with the current penal policy”, the report noted.

It was noted that women in Guyana’s prisons constitute four per cent of the total number of incarcerated persons, and security arrangements at the women’s prison in New Amsterdam, Berbice are extensions of what are in place for the men’s section within the same compound.

This was described by the CoI as “an unnecessarily depressing multiplicity of locks, bars, barbed wire and electronic devices in overcrowded spaces”.

Mentally ill persons who find themselves in trouble with the law are, in significant numbers, passed through the magistracy into Guyana’s prisons; and according to the CoI, the prison service has no resources, human or financial, for integrating them into an overcrowded prison.

“Although the Ministry of Health should provide, statutorily, a full-time medical doctor, the delivery of routine medical services is a constant problem. Services for the mentally ill are even less reliable. This situation works systematic hardship on all aspects of prison life,” the CoI found.
The CoI recommended that the Ministry of Health, aided by the magistracy, the police and the prison service, should intervene in this situation.

It was further revealed that the provision in the Narcotics Act — for persons convicted of narcotics offences to be directed by the magistrate to attend recovery courses at a specialised unit — has never been made viable due to the Ministry of Health never having created the unit.

“Once again, the Prison Service is forced to address this problem as best it can, with no dedicated or professional resources being made available.”

The Commissioners recommended that consideration should be given to releasing aging prisoners early, in the interest of lowering over-crowding. It was noted that this category of prisoners is likely to expand, in view of the sentencing eccentricity which the Judiciary urgently needs to correct.

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