Minister Benn calls for more focus on inmates’ rehabilitation

─ as three-day Senior Officers’ Conference opens

Senior Prison Officers are being urged to put more effort into rehabilitating inmates so that they can be better reintegrated into society upon their release.

This call was made by Minister of Home Affairs Robeson Benn earlier today at the Guyana Prison Service’s (GPS) Senior Officers’ Conference.

Minister Benn said there must also be some sort of self-reform by prison officers to better deal with prisoners. He stressed that introspection and retrospection by prison officers could go a long way in reforming inmates and yield many positive results.

“So, we have to reform ourselves, review the way we see these things, look at these things with new eyes and even where we ourselves would have had personal failings in relation to the issuance to them, take a step back and review how we respond to situations,” the Minister said.

The Home Affairs Minister added, “When we see a prisoner, man or woman and when we consider the bad things they may have done, those crimes are not simply their crimes; those are our crimes. We have to find a way to move along to the point where we reduce these instances of violence, which result in people being incarcerated in these very large numbers”.

The three-day conference under the theme ‘Promoting Rehabilitation and Societal Reintegration of Inmates’ will run until Saturday, March 18, 2023.

The objectives of the conference are: to creating synergies at the managerial level of the Guyana Prison Service; to reflect on and learning from the activities, accomplishments and challenges of operations in 2022; to build cohesive and coherent strategies for performance improvement in 2023 and to devise operational plans that are in alignment with the vision for the Guyana Prison Service

Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs Ms. Mae Toussaint Jr. Thomas, National Security Advisor Captain Gerry Gouveia, Colonel Omar Khan, Acting Commissioner of Police Mr. Clifton Hicken, Chief Fire Officer (ag) Mr. Gregory Wickham, and several other Prison officials and special invitees were in attendance.