GEORGETOWN, Guyana (CMC) — The Guyana government says it is implementing recommendations from a Commission of Inquiry into the riots at the Georgetown Prisons that left several people dead earlier this year.

Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan said that high-profile prisoners housed at the Georgetown Prisons will soon be transferred to a high security prison constructed at an estimated cost of GUY$80 million (One Guyana dollar = US$0.004 cents).

“The brick block is completed with the exception of the doors… I didn’t want to risk putting any prisoners there (in its current state) because it was the hard-core prisoners who were supposed to go there, into that brick prison,” Ramjattan said.

The facility was due to have been completed in July and will house more than 300 high-profile prisoners.

During the Commission of Inquiry, attorney Selwyn Pieters, who represented the Guyana Prison Service, said the government needed to construct the brick prison.

He noted that Superintendent Kevin Pilgrim, officer in charge of the Georgetown Prisons, in his testimony, had said the old wooden structures make it easy for inmates to hide contraband, and pose challenges for officers assigned to the living units.

“Wood buildings at the Georgetown prisons…have their place, and their place now is ‘historic relics’; those are not places to house prisoners,” Pieters said then.