OUR actions have consequences — some of which can end up leaving us worse off.

A reminder — if any was needed — came this week from legislators on both sides of the Parliament. They were expressing real concern that harsher minimum custodial sentences will put even greater pressure on our badly overcrowded prisons, making conditions even more inhumane than they already are.

Worse, perhaps, there is the feeling that such are the conditions, rehabilitation becomes extremely difficult and some inmates could return to society even more committed to crime and violence than before.

Many of our readers will be aware that the Government has proposed amendments to the Criminal Justice (Administration) (Amendment) Act, 2023; The Offences Against the Person (Amendment) Act, 2023; and The Child Care and Protection (Amendment) Act, 2023.

Proposed amendments being looked at by members of a joint select committee of Parliament include longer prison terms, not least a mandatory minimum sentence of 50 years for capital murder.

Our story headlined ‘It will swell prisons’, in Thursday’s edition, says committee members bemoaned deplorable conditions at the two maximum-security prisons — St Catherine Adult Correctional Centre and Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre.

They questioned the capacity for meaningful rehabilitation.

Note the comment from leading lawyer, Opposition Senator Donna Scott-Mottley: “The conditions cannot do anything but dehumanise a person, and [lawyers]… will … tell you that the person who is first apprehended and the person who you see three weeks later are simply not the same person. The fear, the vulnerability when they are just apprehended, is replaced by a kind of braggadocio, ‘bad man’ attitude in three weeks…”

The Opposition senator’s comments were in line with a submission from the Office of the Public Defender that: “The lack of capacity for large intakes in our high-security prisons… is an established fact. The conditions at these institutions are notorious and do not foster meaningful rehabilitation…”

Others, including chairman of the committee and Justice Minister Mr Delroy Chuck, were clearly of a similar view.

Indeed, according to Mr Chuck, St Catherine Adult Correctional Centre and Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre are “sad reflections of what we call prisons”.

However, Mr Chuck argued that in the interest of the proposed amendments, legislators should “compartmentalise our mind and deal with the issues before us…”

Obviously, that’s easier said than done.

We are inclined to think that much of this could have been avoided if a long-promised, modern, maximum-security prison was in place.

Our archives show Jamaican national security ministers making the promise since the 1990s. For the older ones among us, memories go back long before that.

Jamaicans readily recall more recent controversy surrounding Government’s decision to reject the British offer of £25 million to build a prison for local convicts as well as those deported from Britain.

Since then, the Government has repeatedly committed to building a modern prison. Early last year we heard that work would begin in the 2022-23 budget year. To our knowledge that hasn’t happened.

We need not be rocket scientists to recognise that long-standing broken promises flow from the reality that a new prison won’t bring votes. Quite the opposite is probably closer to the truth.

Yet, in the national interest and for the good of us all, that modern maximum-security facility is urgently needed.