…President determined to weed out corruption in prison system
…says Mazaruni to be maximum security prison

PRESIDENT David Granger has said that collusion among prison officers and inmates is nothing new, but he is deeply concerned about it, pointing out that with the right training, prison officers will realise their roles as important and will not compromise the security of the state.
President Granger was reacting to reports that the Camp Street prisoners were up to something much bigger,with evidence pointing to elaborate planning as underground steel pipes at the facility were damaged to make weapons; one of the main fire hydrants disabled and several canisters of gasoline were placed at strategic locations. During the incident on Sunday, most of the buildings at Lot 12 Camp Street were gutted, as well as the Senior Prison Officers’ Sports Club, which was used as a holding area for the evacuated inmates.

Speaking to the Guyana Chronicle on Thursday at State House, the Guyanese leader made it clear that collusion between inmates and officers within the prison will not to be tolerated. He said collusion between the officers and prisoners have been an ongoing feature of the system. “…nothing new between the prison service staff and the prisoners…There obviously had to be some means by which cell phones, weapons and other contraband items were being taken in repeatedly into the prison,” he said.

High-quality training
Meanwhile, the President said while the prisons are old, inappropriate and inadequate, a solution to curbing collusion and corruption is to properly train prison officers. He argues that professionalism is key and believes that by “having a higher quality of prison officers and better training at all levels,” corruption would be minimised. President Granger noted that persons from all walks of life join the Prison Service and those very persons may be acquainted with inmates. “It therefore means prison officers must see their roles as important and therefore not compromise the security of the state. At the senior level, the President believes officers must be given the best possible supervisory training available, here and overseas “so we will have a truly professional prison service.”
“We also need to ensure [that] the physical infrastructure is such that it would not be easily breached. When you have a situation where the prison is probably carrying three times the population, there is a lot of pressure on the staff, pressure on the infrastructure and as a result of that, we might have had glitches.”
Notwithstanding the mishaps, President Granger remains optimistic that with a modern maximum security prison at Mazaruni, there will be a reduction of collusion and glitches. The President who said he is “deeply moved by the two tragedies,” described the situation as “a serious blow to our work to make society safe and to guarantee the human safety of the population.”

He explained that the situation was a difficult one, but noted that efforts would be redoubled to ensure no similar recurrence. “I am of course disappointed and at the same time I am not dismayed; I think we can overcome the problems over the next two to three years,” he said, pointing to what he described as a slight turn around in the Police Force in terms of law enforcement and crime-fighting. And, with the help of partners, the President believes that much improvement will occur. “So my disappointment will turn into relief when these reforms and changes take effect,” President Granger added.
The Georgetown Prison was initially built to accommodate some 550 persons, however, at the time of the second fire on Sunday, 1018 persons were there. “So we are aware of the danger of keeping prisoners in the Georgetown Prison. We made an attempt after the 2016 riot to engage the judiciary to reduce the prison population, which is about three times its limit and as you’ve known about 50 per cent of the prisoners in the Georgetown Prison are on remand. So in addition to very fragile infrastructure, we had overcrowding.”
After the March 2016 fire, President Granger launched a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the prison riots, which resulted in the death of 17 prisoners. He confirmed that another CoI would be held into last Sunday’s inferno. “Yes, we must have an inquiry, but I can tell you that it is likely to confirm some of the information we had before from the previous inquiry. The point is that we were actually working on the implementation of the recommendations of the 2016 CoI and the inquiries held before, including the disciplined services inquiry of 2014.”

“So it was a race against time,” he said, adding, “We never pretended that the prison system was adequate and we were racing to complete the Mazaruni Prison, so that we could have taken the excess amount of prisoners away from Georgetown, particularly the long-term, hard core, dangerous ones,” President Granger continued. He noted too that Sunday’s fire brought an end to a long saga of abuses in the prison system and “we will now have to find the money to find a final solution and that solution will be based [on] a maximum security prison at Mazaruni.”