Editorial | New prison a priority

There is need for greater clarity by the government on its plan to build a new, state-of-the-art prison, including timelines for construction and proposals for a public-private partnership for the project.

Plans for a new prison have been on and off Jamaica’s agenda for decades, and mostly off in the last few years until recent interventions by the junior national security minister, Juliet Cuthbert-Flynn, including at a conference last week of Caribbean correctional officials.

She told the conference that plans were in train for the prison in St Catherine, but provided few details.

Prior to that, Ms Cuthbert-Flynn published an article in the Jamaica Observer making the case for public investment in a correctional facility to replace the 18th- and

19th-century structures that now serve as Jamaica’s two major maximum-security prisons.

“The cost of maintaining outdated correctional infrastructure is measured in far more than ageing buildings,” she wrote. “It is measured in the limitations placed on rehabilitation programmes, the challenges faced by correctional officers working in facilities that have long outlived their intended purpose, the difficulty of integrating modern technology into institutions never designed for it, and the missed opportunity to fully realise the reforms already under way.”

“Put simply, outdated infrastructure limits what our correctional system can achieve,” she added.

UNIMPEACHABLE

The logic of this argument is, of course, unimpeachable, as it was when made by myriad people, including some in the current administration, over several decades. The fact is that conditions at the island’s two main correctional facilities, Tower Street in downtown Kingston and St Catherine in Spanish Town, are practically overcrowded Dickensian workhouses that are beyond reasonable upgrading and repair. The former is more than 180 years old; the latter is more than 300 years old.

Each has an official capacity of around 700 inmates. Tower Street accommodates more than twice the number of inmates for which it was built; St Catherine, 30 per cent more.

Both have been subject to many studies and reviews that have underlined not only their decrepitude, but also the social environment they are likely to foster, making them of little value as places of rehabilitation. Many first-time offenders leave as hardened criminals.

Moreover, the physical buildings, constructed largely of red brick, are increasingly unsafe. Indeed, after a magnitude 5.4 earthquake hit Jamaica in October 2023, government engineers warned that compromised sections of the Tower Street and Spanish Town facilities posed “immediate danger to inmates and staff”.

Over the decades, fiscal constraints and competition for limited resources have been Jamaica’s basic argument for not building a new prison.

In 2015, in a move to help deal with overcrowding in British prisons, the UK government offered Jamaica £25 million towards building a new correctional facility. The deal would require that Jamaican nationals in British jails be allowed to serve the final portions of their sentences in Jamaica, with Britain paying for the cost of their maintenance.

RIDICULED

However, the current administration, then in Opposition, ridiculed the idea, framing it in neocolonial terms, with Britain offering prisons instead of schools. It formally rejected the proposal when it came to office the following year.

In 2022, the government announced that construction of the first phase, the maximum-security wing, of a new correctional facility would begin during that fiscal year. That didn’t happen. The announcement was apparently superseded by a proposal from foreign and local prison operators to construct a new correctional facility on a BOOT basis, build, own, operate, then transfer. Those discussions appear to have foundered.

Humanity and decency insist upon the need for a modern correctional facility in Jamaica. As Ms Cuthbert-Flynn wrote: “Too often, the public conversation has focused solely on the cost of constructing a new correctional facility. Far less attention has been given to the economic, social, and human cost of continuing to rely on infrastructure inherited from another century, facilities never intended to meet modern correctional standards, support rehabilitation, or serve communities that have since grown around them.”

Perhaps financing for a new prison could be an addendum to Jamaica’s agreement with America to host third-country nationals being deported from the United States.