Prisoners need effective rehabilitation

 THE recent great escape at Buimo Jail in Lae has brought to light grave concerns which call for the State’s instant consideration.

 Jails around the country also need urgent audit and probing by independent authorities regarding the jail conditions in the country. 

The problems of overcrowding in prisons, shortage of manpower and the rundown facilities are not the only issues of concern. Other issues include assault by warders, criminal threats and inhumanity to a prisoner, cruel and unusual punishment and wilful omission to perform their duties by prison officers. 

Most of their work is laborious, totally uninteresting and often humiliating. Every person has a right to freedom from inhuman treatment. 

Psychological torture is also employed, including foul language and intimidation accompanied by false promises must also be investigated.

The horrifying and deplorable conditions of brutality, vice and disease (endemic skin diseases especially) existing in the gaols and the crying need for change, both in attitude to the prisoner and in what should have been done with them must be brought to the public’s notice. 

Overcrowding has become intolerable. Even animals have the instinct to turn from suffering.

The high rate of escape by prisoners is an epitaph to suffering.

Authorities must work increasingly to promote the basic idea of reforming the criminals both physically and morally. Warders must also be paid adequately so they will no longer exploit their more wealthy prisoners. 

Prisons must be sanitary, prisoners fed adequately and not wholly left dependent on friends and on what they could gamble or steal from other prisoners.

Punishment for bad behaviour in prisons can still be given, however, with some of their privileges removed or curtail, their diet shorten of extras, though its main content not diminished. Above all their remissions suffers.

A class system should be in place to separate first-time offenders from hardened criminals. 

Subjected to severely overcrowded conditions with insufficient food, first time offenders are brutalised by both common criminals with whom they live and the guards. 

Special boards should be set up, they are to be independent and non-official and can see prisoners anytime and prisoners and send complaints to them which they must investigate. 

Prison officers must treat their charges as separate human beings but they must not make friends among them. They must consider each man’s case separately but must continue to be strictly impartial. They must enforce discipline but avoid all harshness. 

Prisoners should be given the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves, to ameliorate their behaviour so that upon release they could integrate into society in a productive and law-abiding fashion. 

The management practices of PNG prisons are generally tied into notions of control rather than rehabilitation.

Blism Lucrepetitos

Normanby, MBP