Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THE NEW and very costly Horizon Adult Remand Centre is much in the news. Prisoners have been trying to break out of there in droves, and one recently succeeded.
This ought to come as no surprise, since this is a Government noted for its complete absence of management skills and vision.
The so-called Horizon Adult Remand Centre is housed in the renovated buildings of the former "Things Jamaican" manufacturing facility at Bumper Hall. This is the same facility which was recognised for its work by the United Nations.
Things Jamaican had moulds and kilns and made furniture and vases, and highly competent copies of artefacts from the early history of Port Royal and Jamaica. It trained Jamaicans to become master craftsmen, and make all kinds of craft including decorative ceramics which must now be taught on the side of the road in Grants Pen. I could never have imagined that this important cultural icon would be turned into a penal institution by any Government.
Things Jamaican was a purpose-built factory on the outskirts of the Industrial Estate in Kingston created in 1963 by Edward Seaga, then JLP Minister of Development and Welfare. It was created to send trained Jamaicans and quality Jamaican goods and souvenirs out into the world as an expression of our culture.
When the PNP came to office in 1989 Things Jamaican was a going-concern. Then it went though a number of executive changes, and was eventually closed down. Instead of turning it over to HEART/NTA for use as a skills training centre, some bright spark in officialdom just came up with the idea that since it was no longer training people in income-earning skills, it should be converted to house 1,000 prisoners in state-of-the-art security at a cost of $400 million.
Instead of letting fly the incomparable grace of the Jamaican spirit, the same spot now lets fly murderous prisoners and other barbarians. It used to provide hope, now only despair.
In the 1970s the PNP Government of the day put up a Gun Court right on Camp Road, and painted it entirely in red to indicate that it was "dread", with the deliberate intention of frightening the citizenry. And since this was the era when the Suppression of Crimes Act was introduced and the civil liberties of our people infringed upon, the Gun Court was a frightening piece of work indeed. Many families fled Jamaica.
Today another PNP Government has closed down Things Jamaican, and built a prison instead. The prison this time, however, was a building converted from productive work into an adult remand centre, which even at half the prison population for which it was designed, is unmanageable, even assuming that it was properly constructed in the first place. The Star of July 1 reports "All the prisoners have to do is jump on the locks and they open".
What kind of prison is this? And what kind of lock was that? Flimsy in the first, and feeble in the next. And how can the steel required for the walls of a factory be the same as that required for a prison?
Over a week ago the Remand Centre had to call in the police because the prisoners had taken charge of it. Then there was a breakout, and now the military has been sent in to run it. Superintendent Clifton Rogers of the Correctional Services Department, the centre's administrative head, has been sent on leave pending the outcome of investigations into the jailbreak.
Bear in mind that only a week before a warder had been sent home on sick leave, because he was seriously burned by prisoners using lit sponge and pieces of cloth, and throwing them at warders during the disturbance.
I saw the interior of a cell block at the Horizon Adult Remand Centre on television and it was all bright, matching floral bedspreads and bunks with foam mattresses. It looked more like a holiday resort to me, and in the wrong place with the wrong people in it. Moreover, since the security was easily breached and the locks feeble, this had to be a resort, rather than a prison.
So how on earth can poor Superintendent Rogers have anything to do with that? He can't have gone shopping for fabric, nor made the bed spreads. Hell, neither he nor his department may have bought the damn locks, because the Government had previously announced grandly that they bought a "turn-key" job for the $400 million. It seems that the key might have been passed to the wrong set of people. Both the Superintendent and his warders in fact deserve commendation. Before the warder was burnt that night the warders carried out a search of the cells on Friday morning June 28th and found more than 40 jammers (makeshift ice picks some 15 inches long, made from wire), makeshift machetes, ganja and cash. Another source at the facility said that the prisoners hid the weapons on the metal shades on top of the bulbs in the prison. The source said that the prisoners climbed the grill and hid the weapons there.
Who put the metal shades on top of the bulbs in prison? The former Minister of National Security was so keen to open this Remand Centre that he did so before it was ready, and there was an immediate attempted break-out. The Horizon of this PNP Government was therefore deeply clouded from the very beginning, and they never fail to disappoint in the execution.
The Government grandly announced that the new facility would reduce crime, but it has only added to it, as it must. But that is hardly the fault of the warders who have acted bravely in preposterous circumstances. The blame must lie with the design and the policy which is dictated by the dead-end vision of the PNP.
The symbolic content of their actions is that Jamaicans don't need training, what they need are prisons. And so cynical is the PNP Government that they wouldn't even try to make the jail fail-safe.
Dr. Peter Phillips has been on the job for nearly a year now, and is no longer the new kid on the block. Between November last year to June of this year the rate of increase in murder went to unprecedented levels. In addition the rate of police killings has also accelerated under Dr. Phillips' watch.
And there it was I thought nothing could be worse than K. D. Knight as Minister of Security. I have to eat my words.
