The Barbados Prison Service is putting measures in place to ensure that officers do not breach professional boundaries with inmates, as it seeks to recruit more workers.
Superintendent of Prisons Decarlo Payne said the issue has, over the years, been a concern at the Dodds Prison in St Philip.
While he could not promise it would never happen again, he said the management was putting measures in place to prevent officers from developing relationships with inmates.
“Each individual’s action impacts on the integrity of the organisation, depending on whether it’s a negative action or whether it is a positive action,” he told the media following the graduation ceremony of 13 new prison officers.
“Throughout my 42 years here, that’s something that I was always concerned about. I would always be concerned about it because the chain is as strong as its weakest link.”
Minister of Home Affairs Wilfred Abrahams, addressing the graduating prison officers, urged them not to put themselves or the corrections facility in a compromising position.
“The inmates are not your friends and must never be your friends while they are your responsibility. You should be compassionate where required, empathetic when called upon to do so, accommodating when necessary, but uncompromised at all times. To put this in plain language, don’t get tie up about your role with respect to the inmates. Inappropriate behaviour, inappropriate relations and inappropriate associations will not be tolerated . . . .You are here because we trust you,” he said.
Meanwhile, Payne said the prison was in need of 15 more officers and it would carry out another recruitment drive in three months’ time. There were two recruitment programmes this year.
“There’s another 15 vacancies and as soon as we complete that 15, which should be done in another couple of months, we will be back to our 372 as it relates to the establishment; so we will have our full complement back,” he said. “We are looking to start the next recruiting drive somewhere around February because we have to go through a lot of processes in terms of vetting and so on.
So we are looking to finish that hopefully by the end of the financial year [March 31, 2024] because we have the money in this financial year to complete the recruiting. Even if we don’t finish by March 31st, we should be . . . on our way to finishing because the money was already committed.”
The prison head said he was confident the facility could find 15 competent workers, adding that there was an extensive vetting requirement during the application period which involved polygraph testing and mandatory drug testing.
“We’re getting a lot of applicants but then because of the way vetting is done and so on, it actually kind of narrows it down. If you look at what’s happening now in Barbados, we are moving towards something called the National Security Vetting Policy and our vetting mirrors that,” he said.
Payne added that once the officers are hired, the officerto-inmate ratio would be improved: “When we moved here in 2007, our inmate tally was 1 184. To date, we are at 692 and the staff numbers haven’t changed. So you will see that it definitely will be a better ratio.”
There are 21 females and 671 male inmates at Dodds and Payne said “the trend is that [the numbers] are continuing to go down”.
Minister Abrahams also said during his speech that the prison was working with the Barbados National Oil Company Limited to establish a commercial solar energy project with the hope that the prison would generate all the electricity it needs to run and then make a profit by selling some of the excess to the grid.
He added that the facility was also in the initial steps of phasing out its fossil fuel-dependent vehicles and was looking to transform its transportation service into a fleet of hybrid or electric-powered vehicles.
Abrahams said the prison was also looking to expand its agricultural programme so it would also be self-sufficient as it relates to food.
The most outstanding recruit of this cohort was Dario King who was the best at physicals and drills during the 12-week training programme that consisted of personal development courses, ethics and wealth management. (SZB)
