Dear Editor,

The Government is reportedly considering building a new prison, and who can doubt its need. The present structures are deplorable. Maintaining these crumbling buildings and their recidivist or return rates impose major costs on the national budget. They are old fortresses, lacking adequate infrastructure to implement rehabilitation activities, with extremely poor health-care facilities and services.

What should replace these old and inhumane structures is the critical question. According to the published report, the new prison will be a large, maximum security facility and costly — between $8 billion and $10 billion. But is this what Jamaica needs? Is it that we can afford to spend?

Correctional institutions serve two goals: 1)protection of society from child molesters, gang overlords, and predatory or psychopathic criminals and 2) rehabilitation of all who can be rehabilitated.

A central problem of Jamaica’s detention system is the combining of both groups in single institutions. The outcome is that those detained for minor offences learn the attitudes and ways of serious criminals. A monster new prison, run by some private sector body, would no doubt continue this harmful method.

What needs to be highlighted is the vision of such a proposal and a clear understanding of what goals are meant to be achieved. A significant change to be introduced should be the diversification of interventions according to target and commuted sentences. One of the main challenges in the actual system is to prevent minor offenders from coming under the influence of organised gangs or criminals, thereby turning the prison into a school of crime.

Of Jamaica’s present prison population, only 300 to 400 fall in the first predatory and psychopath category. The high security institution needed to contain them will certainly not require anywhere near $8 billion. The prison in Marion, Illinois, USA, with adaption, could perhaps serve as a model. It would be a structure entirely separate from the institution for those in the second category. Rehabilitative efforts would not be excluded.

That second category structure would be something more like our present Tamarind Farm Correctional Centre. This is where the other 3,500 to 4,000 convicted of minor offences would receive the rehabilitation to which they are open. Two more Tamarind Farms with adequate but lower levels of security will not require billion-dollar funding. Their effectiveness is proven.

The State needs to remain fully in charge in exercising control over objectives, the philosophy, and the outcomes related to concepts such as rehabilitation, reintegration, and leading correctional services.

Maria Carla Gullotta

Executive director

Stand Up for Jamaica

carlajamaica51@gmail.com