…on prisons
This “prison saga” just won’t go away, will it? Your Eyewitness just read that three of the young’uns sent up to the New Opportunity Corps (NOC) over in Essequibo also broke out in a clear imitation of the prisoners in Demerara. For some reason, of all the people in Region Two, they chose to mug a Government MP!! Do they blame the horrid conditions at NOC on the Government?
Now if you think things were bad at Camp St…then you haven’t been following events at the NOC! That facility was established BEFORE the Georgetown jail…and contrary to what all their name changes since may suggest, their methods of “straightening out” wayward youths have remained the same.
Which is to say…have most of the corrections officers subject the kids to all kinds of abuse, between bouts of imparting vocational teaching. They make the scandals we read about in certain Religious Bodies, look like tiddledywinks! Can someone say how many of the staff at the NOC (school of hard KNOCKS?) are trained for their jobs?? How about you can count them on the fingers of ONE hand??
As your Eyewitness has been insisting, we in Guyana have to get serious about what we intend our detention centres to achieve. Do we want to exact retribution on those “sent away”? What we’re doing right now most resembles this model. The folks behind bars are “bad guys” in the words of our Public Security Minister – and we have to treat them like bad guys. None of that “punishing the crime and not the criminal” nonsense – the two things are one and the same and nothing can tear them asunder.
This would explain why the convicts at Lusignan were kept in cow pens: where else would you keep “bad guys” excepting in “holding pens”?? To do otherwise might just encourage them in their “bad ways”, no? But we do have a few brave souls who insist that folks put away can be redeemed and “rehabilitated”. They insist prisons should become “reformatories” that TEACH inmates to see the error of their ways and to change the same.
In fact, that’s the model the NOC was supposed to be practising since the eighties or thereabouts. Hence the name change from “Onderneeming Boys School” to “New Opportunity Corps”. So maybe we can poll the NOC graduates since then and find out how many of them stuck to the straight and narrow after release?
If the numbers are high, there might at least be hope for the ones in the “Big Jails” – even though they might be more hardened.
If not, we can only conclude we’ll be wasting our time!
…on Trump vs Trans
Another matter that won’t go away is the tension between the US LGBT community and President Trump. Your Eyewitness isn’t sure if anyone bought Trump’s “softening” of his stance against the LGBT community during the last campaign. Hey! A guy will say ANYTHING to get elected, OK? So, who’s surprised now he’s in the White House, Trump’s backpedalling so fast, it’s leaving the LGBT upended.
Trump’s latest “throwing LGBT’s under the bus” move, is to ban Transgenders (the “T’s of LGBT) from joining the US armed forces. And it’s not just because conservatives outnumber LGBT’s by 100 to 1. Some feel that Trump’s blatant displays of machismo towards women betray visceral doubts about his own masculinity. This is exacerbated by his very obvious misogyny.
He explained his move against Trans in the army by claiming they’d cause too much “disruption”. Why? The rest of the troops will find them so alluring, they’ll become distracted from their job of defending the US??! Really!!?
But wouldn’t they have to be gay to be attracted in the first place??!!
…on Cricket
So since Prezzie thwarted the WPA’s move to “have a say” in the governance of the country, they’ve decided to “try a t’ing” with the governance of Cricket?? Jeez!!
