High-security prison for dangerous prisoners

High-profile prisoners housed at the Georgetown Penitentiary, Camp Street, will soon be transferred to a high security, brick prison constructed at a cost in excess of million.
The decision to construct the high security prison block was made following the findings of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the March prison riots at the Camp Street Prison.
Speaking to media operatives at the Cecil Kilkenny Prison Officers’ Training School, in Lusignan recently, Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan said the “brick block” of the Camp Street Prison to house high-profile prisoners has minor corrections to be done before being commissioned.
“The brick block is completed with the exception of the doors… I didn’t want to risk putting any prisoners there (in its current state) because it was the hardcore prisoners who were supposed to go there, into that brick prison,” Minister Ramjattan explained.
The faulty door, the Minister said, would be fixed shortly as the contractor has to resource some of the locking system apparatus and paraphernalia from overseas.
The brick prison, which was built in the compound of the Camp Street jail to house more than 300 high-profile prisoners, was scheduled to be completed by the end of July.
During the sitting of the CoI into the prison riots, Attorney Selwyn Pieters, who represented the Guyana Prison Service, said Government needed to invest financially in constructing a brick prison, since the main prison is housed in the country’s capital city, which is also the country’s business capital.
Further, Pieters pointed out that Superintendent Kevin Pilgrim, Officer-in-Charge of the Georgetown Penitentiary, in his testimony, had said the old wooden structures make it easy for inmates to hide contraband and posed challenges for officers assigned to the living units.
“Wood buildings at the Georgetown Prisons… have their place, and their place now is ‘historic relics’; those are not places to house prisoners,” Pieters told the Commission at that time.