THERE is no need to further explore what happened at the prisons and the inevitable ruptures that will follow.

From the first protest on the rooftop of the prisons in the mid-90s, attention should have been paid. But far from the vaguest concept of responsibility was the nature of that government, with idiotic response utterances to an obvious dangerous social development, that came from possibly the worst and most banal home affairs minister this country has ever had since becoming an independent nation.
One of the least considered factors is the cultural awareness of the sub-cultures that exist and impact on ‘The all’ that the humanity of Guyana is.
During my school days, the heated casual conversations among young males were as follows: The tough talk of movie characters; how to whip up the courage to ask a young lady you thought you were in love with but she didn’t know for a dance at the school party; cricket, football and James Bond cards and comic books; local boxers and Mohamed Ali; and, relevant to this article, the exploits of local street fighters and ‘bad- men’, names like Ronny Yaw, Eric Skeete, Pemya, Maxie Sargeant, David Allen and the famous fist fight between Lil Ray [Hunt] and Michael Cush and dozens of other grassroot machismo inspirations, including some women the likes of ‘Corn Hero’, who packed a mean punch.
These names span periods of grassroot history, and were common to every village and township where social demarcations, since the emancipation of intended isolation, instituted strong sub-cultures.
Why is the latter relevant to 2017? Because our sheltered [meaning no offence] brothers and sisters who have become custodians of the courts must understand the culture and dynamics of what they are asked to manage every day, especially in a society that has, in less than three years, begun the desperate process to reconstruct its institutions and public perceptions to a functional semblance of sanity, coming from a recent period when the State accommodated the criminalisation of the nation, including the Police Force and the Courts, and exploited its mutations for its own benefit.
I must add this article to the voice of other writers who are confused by the present philosophy of some judges and magistrates who seem not to apply consistency in the discharge of their duties based on what should be an awareness that they are dealing with a redemptive human condition, fully aware that the courts are there to Punish, Intercept and apply Redemptive measures.

BRIDGING THE GAP
To the latter end, they must use their influence to acquire the support systems that can facilitate the public relations needed to bridge the obvious gap of any discourse with the struggles and overall doctrines of the fragmented society we live in.
We lacked the basic social awareness over the past 25 years to pay attention to the symptoms, resulting in no particular directive. Asinine politics ignored the uses of the National Service, and vindictively cancelled its training programmes and structures that could have been enhanced to positively shape lives.
What will three years in prison, at this time, do for 18-year-old Esan Gibson who hid his villager, prison escapee Melvor Jeffrey recently in Agricola? Did Gibson have a criminal record and needs severe punishment? Or was he just caught up in the sub-cultural ethos where help must be given in cases between ‘we and de system’ back in the day ‘Babylon’ when those tests of courage arise? Was a chance missed for orientation through extended confinement in a work group either with the GDF or the GPF or does the structure lack such a framework?
Because, a prison sentence can become the initiating badge into a social cult that was tapped into by dark political minds in the not-so-distant past; the ominous nimbus around those possibilities still exist. Stranger still are the recent revelations that allegations of a plot to kill the President did not even merit detention with persons who fit the profile to have such political and other grouses, that it should be taken seriously, when a man who threatened his wife was placed before the courts and sentenced to prison. This fact in comparison with Esan Gibson gives cause for serious public attention.
The approach to intercepting the sub-culture of crime in Guyana has never evolved as a discourse or ‘Study’ as far as I know. Though interventions like the soon-to return GYC, the past Pioneer Corps and the GNS have impacted on diminishing the inherited underprivileged overcrowded districts vulnerable to the ‘Bad Boy’ sub- culture in a positive way.
From the legal realm of the courts and law enforcement, the application was more automatic; and not just how the Laws were developed, but depended on the enlightenment of the sitting personality, as I will demonstrate at the close of this column.
While still in school, I recall ‘The Angry God’, as Justice Akbar Khan was called, presiding over the courts with wisecracks and ‘Convict Sentences’. He sent career bad- men away for long periods, but never closed the door on them for the rest of their lives. He was smart, unlike some judges today, who use the prison system as a symbolic Biblical eternity to a deserved hell, and igniting an immediate recourse in the prisoner’s resolve to escape rather than to die in prison.

KILLER-FOR-HIRE CULT
The extra-judicial killing of law breakers at the grassroot level was also applied by State authority without consideration of the servicemen used to conduct these acts. It failed, unleashing a criminal cadre of Police killers for hire. We have to go deeper; the problem is cultural and more sophisticated than previously understood.
Back in 2012, I wrote a letter protesting the unusual verdict of a magistrate who had sentenced a single-parent male of three daughters to prison for beating his 14-year- old eldest whom he had sent to school one morning and never returned home until the following afternoon. She was advised to report him to the police by the other male involved, and was screaming when the verdict was meted out to her father.
A senior authority from the Judiciary called me, and we had a most amicable conversation. I learnt that he had briefed his Magistrates about verdicts that could be unsettling, impacting negatively on the social unit involved, and the balance of Justice dispensed, when it could have been handled better. Because, as with this father, there was no social system to cushion the impact it could have on his children who were then left defenceless.
That aberration of Justice was purely the choice of the sitting personality, and possibly that it was a ‘male’ accused at the time. It was inspiring to read that the Caribbean Film Academy and EPIC of Guyana visited the juvenile detention centre at Sophia to show relevant clips to the detainees there to enhance their consciousness of self worth through viewing parallel lives redeemed and enhanced.
There are few private efforts that reach out socially to proactively inspire and galvanise youthful hope. In the lead is Chase’s Academic Foundation’s successful crusade through Sports; this is the only private school that in this era has championed such an altruistic programme, and it should not be ignored and not recognised for the potential it represents, and should be supported by the obvious distracted authority designated to positively affect sports.