YESTERDAY'S SCANDALOUS episode inside the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre calls for the strongest disciplinary action against the persons responsible for maintaining and reviewing the security checkpoints. No excuses, or whitewashing will suffice.This is an instance when Dr. Peter Phillips, the minister with portfolio responsibility, must take the decisive and resolute action about which he has spoken in the past.
It is ironic that yesterday's rioting and shooting that left at least four persons dead and eight injured should have occurred inside one of the country's maximum security prisons at a time when the Governor-General was delivering the Throne Speech with the usual platitudes about not surrendering to criminal elements etc.
That a gun or guns could have been allowed to pass 'unnoticed' through the various security checkpoints to get into the hands of prisoners inside the institution, highlights the frightening depth of the country's corruption. The implications are that for the right price, any number of guns may be smuggled in and a full-scale attack be launched against security personnel in an attempted prison break at any time.
While we have come to expect that periodically there will be outbreaks of fighting among inmates - witness a similar occurrence in Barbados earlier this week - and that inmates will use their ingenuity to craft make-shift weapons, this instance of a gun or several being smuggled into a maximum security facility is not only frightening but speaks to serious lapses in management.
A part of good management is to operate on a basis of systems and not rely on the presumed integrity or goodwill of persons hired to man important facilities. Simply put, there has to be an assumption that people will try to beat the system and so every effort has to be made to stay one step ahead of the criminals. It cannot be that checks are left to only one or a few persons or is done at one point only so we have to assume the corruption runs deep and wide.
So while on the one hand we have thousands of guns and rounds of ammunition passing through the island's ports for apparently easy distribution across the country, now the society is faced with the added worry of weapons being filtered into the hands of incarcerated criminals.
This is slackness of the worst order.
