JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

The Prison Of­fi­cers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (POA) has wel­comed a $165 mil­lion over­time al­lo­ca­tion in the 2027 Bud­get, but says chron­ic un­der­in­vest­ment con­tin­ues to ham­per the op­er­a­tions of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Prison Ser­vice.

POA pres­i­dent Ger­ard Gor­don said the al­lo­ca­tion was a pos­i­tive sign that the Gov­ern­ment had lis­tened to long-stand­ing con­cerns over un­paid over­time owed to prison of­fi­cers.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Gor­don said the al­lo­ca­tion was note­wor­thy.

“We did note, how­ev­er, that there was an al­lo­ca­tion of $165 mil­lion un­der the item over­time. Of course, that is, by our stan­dards, an in­di­ca­tion that the Gov­ern­ment has been lis­ten­ing, at least on that is­sue.”

Ac­cord­ing to Gor­don, ap­prox­i­mate­ly $148 mil­lion of the al­lo­ca­tion is to be used for out­stand­ing pay­ments dat­ing back as far as 2011.

He de­clined to de­scribe the pay­ments as back­pay, adding that in­ter­est should be added.

“I would have want­ed to have some in­ter­est placed on that mon­ey owed,” he said, ar­gu­ing that in­fla­tion had sig­nif­i­cant­ly erod­ed the val­ue of mon­ey owed more than a decade ago.

Ad­dress­ing con­cerns about al­leged abuse of over­time sys­tems, Gor­don main­tained that such is­sues were un­like­ly with­in the Prison Ser­vice be­cause of the way over­time claims are struc­tured.

He added that the as­so­ci­a­tion would sup­port the dis­missal of any of­fi­cer found sub­mit­ting fraud­u­lent claims.

Apart from over­time, Richards raised con­cerns about oth­er ar­eas of spend­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly uni­forms and med­ical ben­e­fits.

De­scrib­ing the lack of uni­form pur­chase in the prison ser­vice since 2018 as “un­ten­able,” Gor­don said there are of­fi­cers who have been in the ser­vice for near­ly five years and are yet with­out prop­er uni­forms.

He ar­gued that uni­forms should be treat­ed as an es­sen­tial tool of the job and form part of an of­fi­cer’s terms and con­di­tions of em­ploy­ment.

He re­it­er­at­ed the call for an over­haul of the cur­rent uni­forms for prison of­fi­cers, say­ing the ser­vice needs a fit-for-pur­pose uni­form un­like the heavy one now in use.