–with more than one child from multiple partners

FOR every 10 prisoners, four have been found to be parents many times over and with multiple partners.
That’s a whopping 35.9 per cent of the entire prison population, according to a study titled “Guyana Prison Service Inmates Survey” released on Monday.

The total number of inmates sampled in the study was 2,043 across five penal institutions.
And what that survey found, was that a good many of those 2000-odd inmates came from broken homes. They went on to become adults and live the same “unstructured” way they did back when they were children.

Thus, with abject poverty the order of the day, many an inmate particularly the males, were unable to support and sustain the various women with whom they had children. And, in the case of the women, it meant never having enough money to feed all those little hungry mouths.

During the course of the study, which was done under the Citizens Security Strengthening Programme, many inmates who admitted having children were asked at what age they became parents.
And invariably, one out of every three said they were 18 or younger, though a good 55.9 per cent or so admitted having their first child at 21.

What this means in reality, according to the report, is that having children at such an early age might have limited the job opportunities for a good share of the inmates.
What was interesting, however, is that while most of the female prisoners (some 47.4 per cent) admitted having their first child at 18 or younger, by contrast, only 25.1 per cent of the male prisoners became fathers at such a tender age.

Meanwhile, of those inmates who admitted having worked a month or so before their arrest, over half of them (56.3 per cent) were working more than 40-hours-a-week shifts, while others were getting jobs here and there, pulling between 21 to 40-hour shifts, whenever the opportunity presented itself.

What this proved, the report noted, was that a very large share of the prisoners who were employed before being arrested, were either working very long hours or were underemployed.

Underemployment, which is the same as work overload (and can be taken as indirect indicators of low wages and precarious working conditions), the report says, appears to be the working background of a good proportion of those who had a job when they committed the crime for which they were incarcerated.

Of those inmates who were working one month before their arrest and asked what other means of income they had outside of their job, a good many (67.7 per cent) said none. Only a small minority said that they had other means, from such illegal activities as selling drugs or dealing in other illegal goods.

There were some, however, 12.4 per cent or so, who got a “top-up” from time to time from either relatives or friends, or were on pension or welfare.
In summary, which is consistent with findings from other countries, most inmates are able to make a living although strong indicators show that earnings were not high and they worked in precarious positions.