YES and Prison Fellowship Barbados team up to keep young offenders out of prison

A stronger restorative justice system would minimize the numbers of offenders going to jail for petty crimes,  Minister of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment Dwight Sutherland suggested Friday.

Speaking at the handing over of equipment to the Prison Fellowship of Barbados at the ministry’s Sky Mall office, Sutherland said that the time has come to separate petty crimes such as drug abuse from what he describes as serious crimes., This he suggested would prevent young people from being incarcerated and give them a new lease on life through restorative programmes.

Sutherland said: “I believe the time has come for us to create programmes such as this, more public-private partnerships to address what I call petty crime as opposed to making criminals out of some of our citizens who are very talented and who we believe have a role to play in our development.

“The reality is when we have partnerships such as the Prison Fellowship in Barbados partnering with the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment, partnering with the other third sector organizations, we tend to change lives and create opportunities.”

The partnership between the youth ministry and the Prison Fellowship is to provide training for ex-offenders and those on parole in areas from garden maintenance to entrepreneurship.

Sutherland said that in light of the current spate of violence, partnerships such as what has been formed between the ministry and the charity should be seen as important.

He said the partnership has the potential to help reduce the recidivism rate and help law-abiding citizens lead meaningful lives.

Sutherland suggested that half of the $28 million budgeted for the Barbados Prison Service for 2021-2022 should be spent on programmes for the youth.

He said: “I know over the last few days we have been hearing about a number of shootings. This is not good for our society. When I speak about it I often get very emotional because we don’t want to have anyone being murdered neither by gun, by knife, by any form of deviant behaviour. We saw recently, a young man went about his way to injure persons within the hotel sector.”

Executive Director of the Prison Fellowship Neil Dowden explained that considering the difficulties ex-inmates encounter when trying to find employment, the partnership with the Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme (YES) will allow young men and women to become self-employed.

Dowden appealed to corporate Barbados and private citizens to contact Prison Fellowship for garden maintenance and debushing services.

He said: “The guys will be supervised by our volunteers and the job will be professionally done. We just want to help these young men, as well as their families. It is not only the inmates that suffer because when they cannot work their families suffer.

“Up to just before Easter, after we came out of the lockdown, we had to give out about 300 hampers to help because things were getting a bit rough. So we are appealing to you to work with us as we try to help these young men.

“We have spent over $35,000 in equipment and we want to give God thanks for this and we want to give the Government thanks for seeing the need to support us.

“In years to come, this move will reduce the population at Her Majesty Prison Dodds and will show the ex-inmates that they will be able to get the second chance”.

(anestahenry@barbadostoday.bb)