— rehabilitated offender, now pastor Wendell Jeffrey

REHABILITATED offender, now pastor and positive social figure Wendell Jeffrey is calling for a more humane approach by prison administrators, contending that their efforts must focus on rehabilitation and not punishment.

Jeffrey in his early days was incarcerated because of a problematic childhood and exposure to criminal life.

The Laing Avenue, West Ruimveldt resident, said his external environment had helped shape his already weakened moral and behavioural dispositions which led to his eventual imprisonment on drug-trafficking convictions.

While in prison, he said, he was awakened to the realities of prison life which fuelled his passion for prisoner rehabilitation, especially since he knew first-hand that circumstances led many persons to crime.

Following his release, Jeffrey said he moved his family to the United States and did a Bachelor’s degree in Ministerial Theology at Oakwood University.

While pursuing a masters’ degree at Andrews University, he said he founded the Practical Christianity Ministries and began his work.

He applied and was accepted as a volunteer chaplain and criminologist with the Department of Corrections in the State of Indiana; working with a prison population of some 3000 men at the Westville Correctional Facility.

There, the pastor said, he developed “a Best Practice rehabilitation concept called ‘Practical Talk,’” whereby  inmates are taken through a pre-release course in cognitive reorientation and then accepted in a post-release programme, which provides transitional services such as housing, job-skills, legal assistance, academic tutelage, and drug detoxification, among others.

“This is the kind of approach that is lacking in Guyana,” the pastor opined, adding that “Prison needs to be a developmental journey for the incarcerated. We can no longer see the prisons just as penal institutions. And this is what I am offering to the authorities in Guyana.”

The pastor said the prison system needs sustainable prisoner-reform programmes, and in cases where skill sets such as tailoring, mechanic and electrical insulation are offered, they must be lasting or impactful.

Jeffrey charged that there are five basic criminogenic needs that must be met simultaneously, in order to reduce the occurrences of repeated crime and recidivism.

These, he said, are vocational training, housing, education, substance dependency and spiritual formation, which helps to maintain the chain of rehabilitation.

He noted that 97per cent of inmates are released back into society, while only three per cent who are either sentenced to death or life without parole remain.

A CONCERN

This is a concern to society, he said, especially when persons come to prison are affected behaviourally, mentally, vocationally and financially.

“The criminal justice system then, is supposed to provide services that work at releasing a better person than the one who came to them.”

Prisons in the developed world have long moved away from being just penal institutions, the pastor said.

“Incarceration is now slanted towards rehabilitation. Ironically, Guyana, a country known for its criminal activities, has not caught up with the new trend. We still lock-up people, purely as a form of punishment. And we do so without the ability to manage those we lock -up.”

He said over the years, the inmates with lots of idle time, get involved in all kinds of schemes and grow progressively more irritated when their basic human rights are constantly violated.

Many of the prisoners locked up here for protracted periods are on remand or they have not been tried and found guilty.

“So what we keep having is a perfect storm. We have men who are sentenced and are being treated inhumanely; men who are not yet sentenced and are suffering the same fate; an inadequate officer-to-inmate ratio and prison wardens who are vulnerable to the overtures of the inmates, for financial gains. What happened last year, when several men died, was a coming to head of all those problems and the resulting explosion,” he said.

The pastor said given official reports, the Camp Street disaster was not an act permutated by the combined frustration of the inmates, but a planned escape strategy, which he believes got cover from other prisoners because of their frustration with the system.

Jeffrey related that prison is about the restriction of freedoms and people do not like to have their freedoms restricted, so prison will always be a hated place.

“However, what has to be uppermost in the minds of the administration is the safety and well-being of the inmates.”

It would do government well to invest in establishing rehabilitation/transitional facilities, with much stakeholder involvement, the pastor said.