Convicted prisoner sets fire at Camp Street Prison

…blaze quickly contained

Catastrophe was avoided on Friday when a fire set by a convicted prisoner was quickly extinguished.

Reports are convicted prisoner Odel Roberts, who is serving three years for trafficking in narcotics and who was also committed to stand trial for murder, set the fire after a fellow prisoner refused to lend him a cell phone and DVD player.
In a statement, Director of Prisons, Gladwin Samuels said that Officer in Charge of the Georgetown Prison, Superintendent Olivia Cox reported that at about 16:50h on Friday a fire was set on the catwalk of the solitary division of the prison.
“This was quickly brought under control by the officers on duty at the prison,” Samuels said. According to the statement, Roberts lit newspaper and a piece of his mattress and threw these on the catwalk outside the door of the prisoner with whom he has the disputes.
“Officers of the Guyana Fire Service visited the scene. They have declared the prison compound safe. The police are investigating,” the statement.
Over the past few years, the Prisons Service along with the Guyana Fire Service and the Guyana Police Force have been grappling with inmates starting fires at various penitentiaries across the country.
However, the Camp Street facility experienced the worst of these back in 2016 and then in 2017. Seventeen prisoners were burnt to death on March 3, 2016, after inmates had set several fires in their holding cell in protest of the conditions of the prisons. The following year in July, a second fire at the city penitentiary had completely destroyed and flattened wooden structures in the compound. That fire resulted in a riot at the facility during which five inmates escaped and one prison officer was killed.
However, Friday’s fire comes on the heels of a previous attempt to break out of the Camp Street Prison back in January. That plot was thwarted by Prison Officers.
Meanwhile, in August 2019, committed prisoner Delon Butcher received injuries about his body after he set fire to his mattress in the security block of the New Amsterdam Prison, Berbice.
The fire was extinguished by Prison Officers on duty.
Some four months earlier at that same prison, another convicted prisoner who is serving a 25-year sentence for murder, started a fire.
Then on April 21, 2019, Devon Griffith started a fire in the solitary confinement area but the blaze was contained and extinguished before firefighters arrived at that location.
On July 14, 2017, prisoners incarcerated at the Lusignan Prison, East Coast Demerara (ECD), attempted to set fire to the wooden structure.