Much has been said over many years about the de­te­ri­o­rat­ing con­di­tions in this coun­try’s pris­ons, where re­cidi­vism is more com­mon than re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and pre­vail­ing con­di­tions turn pet­ty of­fend­ers in­to hard­ened crim­i­nals.

Nu­mer­ous re­ports over many years have sound­ed alarms about an out­dat­ed, in­ef­fec­tive pe­nal sys­tem heav­i­ly fo­cused on de­pri­va­tion and pun­ish­ment.

Trinidad and To­ba­go’s over­crowd­ed and dys­func­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties fea­tured promi­nent­ly in the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank’s (IDB) Re­gion­al Com­par­a­tive Re­port—Sur­vey of In­di­vid­u­als De­prived of Lib­er­ty: Caribbean 2016-2019, with its warn­ing that pris­ons “will con­tin­ue to con­tribute to the crime prob­lem by re­leas­ing in­mates who have a high like­li­hood of re-of­fend­ing.”

That re­port might not have in­flu­enced Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds’ pre­sen­ta­tion in the Sen­ate on Tues­day when he pi­lot­ed the Firearms (Amend­ment) Bill. How­ev­er, even in­ad­ver­tent­ly, his con­tri­bu­tion re­in­forced the find­ings of that sur­vey.

Al­though the fo­cus of the de­bate was the pro­vi­sion in that leg­is­la­tion to pro­vide prison of­fi­cers with gov­ern­ment-is­sued firearms, it was hard to over­look the min­is­ter’s rev­e­la­tions about il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties be­hind prison walls.

The ex­is­tence of a “jail­house econ­o­my” that, in the min­is­ter’s own words, gen­er­ates “plen­ty mon­ey,” shows the ex­tent to which pris­ons have be­come a ma­jor con­trib­u­tor to vi­o­lent crimes that con­tin­ue to over­whelm T&T.

Min­is­ter Hinds paint­ed a chill­ing pic­ture of the coun­try’s most dan­ger­ous of­fend­ers, in­clud­ing mem­bers of crim­i­nal gangs who ap­pear to be un­fet­tered in their abil­i­ty to ex­tort large sums of mon­ey from busi­ness­peo­ple and or­der hits from with­in prison.

As a re­sult, when bail or ac­quit­tal is at­tained, crim­i­nals get out of jail and get easy ac­cess to cars, busi­ness­es, prop­er­ty and mon­ey to con­tin­ue il­lic­it ac­tiv­i­ties.

Ac­cord­ing to the min­is­ter, that “beast is get­ting big­ger and fat­ter” and he pro­vid­ed lit­tle as­sur­ance any re­al head­way can be made in clamp­ing down on the crim­i­nal en­ter­pris­es op­er­at­ing with­in the prison sys­tem.

He con­ced­ed the au­thor­i­ties have not been able to halt the il­le­gal com­mu­ni­ca­tions that en­able un­der­ground ac­tiv­i­ties be­hind bars. Tech­nol­o­gy in­stalled for that pur­pose and oth­er ef­forts have had lim­it­ed im­pact, Min­is­ter Hinds ad­mit­ted.

That is an un­ac­cept­able state of af­fairs.

Il­le­gal com­mu­ni­ca­tion from in­mates has been linked to the mur­ders of 16 prison of­fi­cers in the last ten years, as well as threats made to some 88 prison of­fi­cers in the past year.

There is al­so the mat­ter of a reg­u­lar flow of con­tra­band in­to pris­ons.

It is clear that im­pris­on­ment, in­clud­ing the lengthy de­ten­tion of pris­on­ers on re­mand, is no longer a de­ter­rent and has not made T&T any safer.

No won­der re­cidi­vism rates are so high.

T&T’s pris­ons have long been the most dys­func­tion­al as­pect of a bro­ken crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Its ma­jor fail­ings are chron­ic over­crowd­ing and out­dat­ed sys­tems of pris­on­er man­age­ment which were not fixed dur­ing the tenures of suc­ces­sive min­is­ters of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and not even dur­ing a re­cent ad­min­is­tra­tion that had a Jus­tice Min­is­ter in its Cab­i­net.

Min­is­ter Hinds, in seek­ing to jus­ti­fy the need for the var­i­ous pro­vi­sions in the Firearms (Amend­ment) Bill, re­vealed a prison sys­tem that bare­ly serves even the ba­sic pur­pose of re­duc­ing risk and pro­vid­ing com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty.

Now that he has iden­ti­fied the prob­lems in such de­tail, Min­is­ter Hinds needs to tell cit­i­zens what is be­ing done to fix T&T’s dys­func­tion­al prison sys­tem.