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Activists Take Aim at Caribbean Prisons
By Wesley Gibbings
PORT OF SPAIN (IPS) - Four Nigerians housed for close to two years at the maximum-security prison facility at Golden Grove in East Trinidad , cannot wait to be flown back home following an incident that could have cost this country its diplomatic relations with the West African nation.
Local authorities have not been having an easy time getting transit visas for the illegal immigrants, but following a beating at the hands of local prison officers and alleged incidents of sexual abuse, the Nigerian government lodged a sharply-worded complaint which helped hasten the process.
The Nigerians, along with several locals, were beaten during a small riot against prison conditions last month.
National Security Minister, Joseph Theodore, says the government had learnt a lesson about the handling of illegal immigrants, but prison sources say the more important lesson has to do with worsening prison conditions here .
Former magistrate, Patrick Jagessar, who was jailed for two years in 1988 for bribery said recently "prison is not a place for boy scouts". There a re few who would not agree.
General Secretary of the Prison Officers Association, Michael Mollineau has described conditions, for prisoner and prison officer alike, as "atrocious."
Similar complaints have led to major prison riots in Jamaica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines in recent years and, only two weeks ago, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) wrote Jamaican Prime Minister Percival Patterson denouncing the mass beating of prisoners at the St.Catherine District Prison there.
In a letter to the IACHR, Caribbean Rights Chairman Simeon Sampson claimed that "prisons in Jamaica, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, are notorious for their chronic overcrowding and deplorable conditions which constitute a violation of human rights."
Such notoriety was again highlighted last week when inmates of the Glendairy prison facility in Barbados, including two Colombians, went on a hunger strike over conditions there. This earned the protests of a nu mber of organisations on the island and the rebuke of the Colombian Ambassador to Barbados.
"It should therefore be clearly understood that while persons who are sent to prison are deprived of their liberty, they should not be deprived of their basic human rights," Caribbean Rights said in a statement.
"The relevant authorities need to be reminded that the basis for reform of prisons is rooted in the premise that in order for prisoners to be treated in a humane manner, there should be a change of attitude towards them," the Barbados-based organisation said. "Prisons must not be dehumanising and must not seek to remove the dignity or self-esteem of prisoners who are sent to prison as punishment and not for punishment."
Last year, the 400 prisoners housed in the crammed facility in Kingstown, St Vincent rioted more than once over conditions at Her Majesty's Prison ..
The poor state of affairs prompted the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Human Rights Association (SVGHRA) to declare that "people are not sent to prison for punishment. The loss of liberty is the punishment."
"It is wrong and unlawful for inmates to be subjected to physical brutality by prison personnel, summarily and with impunity," the SVGHRA said.
A joint statement issued Monday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Committee against Torture, the Board of Trustees of the Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture and the Special Rapporteur on Torture suggested that the treatment of some prisoners can amount to torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
The statement called on all societies not to accept torture "if it we re a regular feature of police detention or imprisonment, as something which is an inevitable part of the treatment by police or prison officials."
Caribbean Rights meanwhile points to "one of the tragedies of imprisonment in the Caribbean" which is that "very often, living conditions are extremely poor, with severe overcrowding and under-staffing, which does not lend itself to the humane treatment of those who are imprisoned."
In Trinidad and Tobago, alone, facilities designed to house 1,100 inmates now hold over 4,500 inmates. There are sporadic reports of prison epidemics including tuberculosis, and AIDS has arisen as a serious problem among prisoners.
"I was put in a prison eight feet square with other prisoners," he said. "I had to sleep standing. The bath-room was a bucket," Jagessar recalls.
It is believed that similar conditions contributed to the gutting by fire of the prison in Castries, St. Lucia two years ago. A new facility is being built, but, in the interim, prisoners there are housed in severely cramped conditions.
"Prisons," Caribbean Rights said, "have long been regarded as institutions in which profound abuses of human rights can be carried out under the re assuring justification that this is needed to protect the public."
In that regard, there has been no groundswell of public sympathy for prisoners in the Caribbean.
Monday's joint statement, on the occasion of International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, however, advises that "it is not only governments that should take action; individuals, groups of citizens and non- governmental organisations may contribute to the elimination of torture by condemning this crime and by not accepting torture as if it were a regular feature of police detention or imprisonment."
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