Prison Work Programme

Recently the mayor of Kingston, Desmond McKenzie was lamenting about the state of the May Pen cemetery and stated that the care of the cemetery should be contracted out to ensure that it is properly maintained.  This made me wonder what had happened to the prison work programme, after all aren’t some persons sentenced to jail with hard labour.  Currently I am not aware of any hard labour programmes that take place in prison and I would welcome any insight into this matter.

I would like to suggest that caring for the May pen cemetery seems to be an ideal project for the programme.  At a time when the country does not possess the resources to pay someone to clean the cemetery, the question must be asked as to why the government does not let the prison service have the responsibility.  In addition given the general problem surrounding drain cleaning and the bushing of crown lands then why not also assign some of these tasks to the prison service.

This programme could be worked in two ways, firstly you could make the prisoners work at no cost and the government could use some of the money saved to pay for rehabilitation of the inmates.  Alternatively, the persons who work on the schemes could be paid a stipend which they would receive when they leave prison.  This money could then be used to help them have a new start.  There are of course other ways to administer the programme and any one or combination of several could work.

I always stress that it is not just about cutting costs but in using the little that you do have more efficiently.  The cost of maintaining prisoners is very expensive but having them leave as hardened criminals is even worse.  There is a need to offset some of this expense in order to be able to maintain the prisons.  Now I know that someone will say that it is not practical to give work to prisoners when there are so many unemployed persons.  But the reality is that the work is not being done anyway as one can plainly see and hear in every community.  In addition prisoners will not be able to do all of the work that is available.  The most important point is that they do some of the available work and help to support their upkeep and improve their chances of rehabilitation.