Minister of Defence Wayne Sturge has highlighted mounting security concerns within the country’s prison system.
Speaking at a pre-budget consultation meeting in the Caroni Central constituency on Wednesday, he said crime remains the country’s biggest concern, with growing threats now coming from inside the prisons.
“Let me just give you an example. You would know that there are things that are allowed into prisons illegally. No one is surprised about marijuana and cocaine and other drugs and so on, and other types of contraband. But I don’t know if you are aware that recently a couple guns were found in prison. That’s a serious security risk.”
The Minister said the scale of contraband is deeply concerning, highlighting one inmate in a high-security section who had a full-sized flat-screen television in his cell.
“There’s a certain prisoner, I won’t call his name, a certain prisoner who had in his cell in the infamous Building 13, which was reserved for the worst of the worst, he had in his cell a very large flat-screen TV. You all heard of that? Yeah, I think it’s 65 inches. Now usually when you confront the prisons about how things go in, they don’t seem to bring anything into the prison. It’s always drones dropping anything, so I don’t know how they dropped in a 65-inch TV.”
He noted that while corruption is a factor, fear is also fuelling the breaches, as prison officers face pressure and intimidation from inmates and organised criminal networks.
“They are human beings, and they are subject to the same fears that we have. More so, where they work is where the prisoners live, and it’s not hard to find out where they live and so on. So they are obviously fearful. But the level of fear that they face, it has now reached to the stage where it’s easy for communication from some of the most dangerous prisoners to get out into the public domain and for them to carry out all sorts of nefarious activities.”
The Minister stated that the government has already removed six dangerous inmates from the system to stem the influence of gang leaders behind bars, and more efforts are coming, including advanced surveillance and interception tools.
“But in the short term, what we need to do is acquire the sort of technology that is not dependent on too much human intervention because when you rely too much on human intervention, human beings can obviously be corrupted.”
Minister Sturge says the public can expect a stronger, technology-driven crime response aimed at reducing risk to law enforcement while targeting key threats. He is urging citizens to be patient as the government moves to extend the State of Emergency and confront what he describes as an internal war.