The cry for a new prison is decades old.

It is renewed today because conditions in the present prisons are being brought sharply home to society by impartial research and non-governmental organisation Stand Up For Jamaica (SUFJ). In addition, our greater awareness of the rights of prisoners as human beings will no longer tolerate the cruelty and immoral inhumanity that we are dealing out to them.

The obstacle to the construction of a new prison appears to be the misconception that it should be a massive multibillion-dollar building like the ones on Tower Street in Kingston or in Spanish Town, St Catherine. The pattern today is to cram into those former slave quarters everyone convicted of a crime regardless of the nature or frequency of the crime – first time petty theft or a string of murders. The new prison would separate these two sets of prisoners, not take mass incarceration as its model to be copied. Currently, well over one of every three inmates (41 per cent in 2021, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica) will return to prison, not exactly an example of success.

Modern prisons are different. They are of two kinds, matching the double purpose of prisons and the two kinds of people convicted of crime. The first kind would be a set of low-security places designed to rehabilitate the 2,400 who are not habitual or hardened criminals. These are first or second-time offenders found guilty of petty theft; minor drug sales; some, but not extreme, violence, scientifically assessed as redeemable if given the chance.

Much of their behaviour has emerged from the traceable rough circumstances of their family upbringing, social companionship full of conflict, prolonged lack of work, and harsh treatment by police.

Four or five of the low-security prisons that Jamaica already has, upgraded to accommodate larger numbers and resourced for serious rehabilitation, could provide the alternative needed to the Tower Street and Spanish Town prisons. Halfway houses would be needed to carry forward the rehabilitating programme. These prisons would have the space SUFJ Executive Director Carla Gullotta in a recent release complained is so lacking at Tower Street.

The school organised by SUFJ with the help of the Department of Correctional Services has been able to accommodate only 200 of the six times that number wanting to be admitted. The same goes for the skills training workshops and laboratories, which, depending on the nature of the workshop, can take only 20, 40, or 50 of the much larger number seeking admission.

The second prison is the maximum security kind for the safety and protection of society from sociopaths. Sociopaths are habitual murderers, hitmen, violent gang overlords, repeat rapists, chronic molesters, human traffickers, and drug purveyors. Being relatively few, in Jamaica probably no more than 300 to 350, their prison, though newly constructed from the ground up, would be small, thence not cost the multiple billions bandied about.

Former The University of the West Indies Professor of Criminology Bernard Headley, now deceased, suggested in a public forum in 2017 that the high-tech, high-security, but relatively small-capacity US federal prison at Marion, Illinois, USA, could be, with adaptations, a useful model. Rehabilitative efforts, even with these offenders, would not be abandoned.

The advantage of the division of prisoners into two separate prisons is considerable. First- and second-time offenders would not be exposed to the boastful and continuous example, influential guidance, and concrete real-life linkages promoted by hardened criminals. This would have the result of strengthening every effort to move the clearly redeemable prisoners onto a new path.

Based on education and skills creation, rehabilitation would be getting to the root of crime. Not also to be ignored is the economic value of a reduction in crime and returning those responsive to rehabilitation to productive lives in society.

Lastly, the separation would be a powerful argument with international bodies, especially if funding for a new prison is being sought. It may be pointed out that this division matches prison objectives — societal safety and prisoner rehabilitation.

halpeace.levy78@gmail.com