It is inconceivable that the State can be paying $20,000 to $25,000 per month to keep a prisoner in Remand Yard. The costs as given by Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi, reach up to $50 million per month for 2,230 prisoners and billions of dollars stretching over the years.
There is surely need for a substantiating breakdown of the figures to indicate what in the prison system would cause the State to have to spend those kinds of sums.
That issue is raised in the context of the horrid conditions in the prisons, the low quality of food fed to the prisoners, the state of facilities and the fact that no new facilities have been built for years.
To follow the announcement, AG Al-Rawi needs to give the nation an analysis of the efficiency of the spending so as to assure taxpayers that quantities of funds are not leaking out to feed corrupt activities.
Then there is the issue of people being held in prison for minor offences such as the use of obscene language, child maintenance and even traffic offences.
In the latter two examples, there is no hope of the jailed men being able to earn to take of their children and or to pay traffic fines. Jailing them is then counter-productive.
Equally unfair and fulfilling of little purpose is having prisoners on remand for between seven to 10 years without their cases being heard. Even more frightening is that 42 per cent of the prisoners on remand are on murder charges.
The above situations are also a dire comment on the entire criminal justice system, the Judiciary being at the centre of it all.
Succeeding chief justices through Michael de Labastide, Sat Sharma and now CJ Ivor Archie have spent collective hours in speeches at the opening of law terms talking about backlogs which seemingly cannot be cleared.
The reality is that instead of serving as a system to assist with the rehabilitation of especially young people who have wandered into criminal activity, our criminal justice system is producing criminals and at exorbitant costs.
How else but deeply angry can a young man/woman feel if he/she spends ten years in jail awaiting trial and then, if found guilty, the sentence for the crime would have amounted to a six-month or five-year jail term.
If at least a few of these men and women on remand were not criminals when they went in, they must surely have graduated in criminal activity given what is known to happen in the prison system.
There is also the gross injustice being perpetrated against taxpayers who have to fund such a malfunctioning system at the levels indicated above.
Prison reform is one of those subjects that this society has talked about for decades and done little to begin transforming.
Surely it takes little to understand that jailing people for minor offences such as the use of obscene language and parking on the wrong side of the road is quite unproductive; it solves nothing.
Non-custodial sentencing has been a feature of modern approaches to criminality for decades; it is mysterious why it has not been fully implemented here.
A few years ago there was a plan to develop an agricultural project for prisoners near the Piarco roundabout.
Such a project can feed all inmates and result in a far more productive individual leaving the prison system.
The state/Government has to become far more proactive in solving problems rather than having them build up in the manner that this prison disease has which now faces the economy and society.