Just over one year after the most deadly disturbance at the Georgetown Prisons in March 2016 in which seventeen prisoners lost their lives, came the most fiery event in its more than one hundred year history. The government led by President Granger and Vice-President and Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan have been busy trying to exonerate themselves and the APNU+AFC government of any responsibility. President Granger, whose presidential campaign was predicated on security and good governance, defends Mr Ramjattan while the latter sought to excuse his failures to take meaningful and effective action to fix the broken justice and prison system partly on the necessity to subsidise GuySuCo.
President Granger’s response to the 2016 deaths was his most predictable: a Commission of Inquiry (CoI). Yet he and his government have failed to carry out the single most important and no cost recommendation – “the creation of a High Level Committee focused solely on reducing the cancer of over-crowding, along with a range of ancillary recommendations to improve the engagement of key agencies and to strengthen the professional capacity of the GPS to respond to its diverse challenges.”
Overly deferential to the President to whom the CoI expressed “unbounded gratitude”, the Executive Summary of its report noted that the authors would be “even more satisfied should our findings be acted upon with deliberate haste” and implored the President “in a year’s time to order a review of their effectiveness”. That the number of inmates in the jail actually increased between the two horrific events is a strong indicator that instead of action we had inaction and instead of effectiveness we witnessed negligence on a national scale. Continue reading “Goverment failed to act on 2016 CoI recommendation to appoint high level committee”