Jails using ‘open-door policy’

THE standard joke about the PNG jail system is that it has an “open-door policy”. Of course the joke is grounded in fact – the frightening number of jail breaks we have every year. It is as if you can walk in and walk out of jail as you please. Now we have a confidential report into the system which reveals a far more frightening facet of jails in our country.

There is an escape almost daily from one of our jails throughout the country.
It is so regular single person escapes are not reported. We pray this report, by a National Security Advisory Committee-sanctioned investigation team, is exaggerated because it would be frightening otherwise.

More frightening is the assertion in the report that jails are now performing a reversed role to what they are intended to do. They have become recruiting and training ground for criminals.
People who go in for minor offences or even the hundreds who spend long periods on remand have been “recruited” by hardened criminals doing time and turned into hard core criminals.

This, of course, is not deliberate and is not an indictment on the efforts of many thousands of good warders who struggle every day to do their jobs.

The blame is placed squarely at the feet of a series of hapless managers and a government which has neglected this vital service for too long. Long enough so that today the senior management operat­es quite independently and without any know­ledge of what goes on in the prisons around the country.
Successive governments have failed to resource the force.

The force has failed to recruit new officers or get a decent corporate plan in place. A detailed report by PricewaterhouseCoopers on the state of the Correctional Service and how to reform and build capacity is gathering dust. There are 23 declared correctional institutions, 89 police lock-ups and 136 rural lock-ups. While some have been condemned by health authorities, many more suffer from poor resources allocation to core functions. Most prisons are overcrowded.

The main regional prison in Bomana has 600, Buimo a further 600 and Kerevat and Baisu each have about 500. There are about 6,000 prisoners nationwide but only 300 warders to look after them.
The ratio is one CS officer to 20 prisoners, when the ideal warder to prisoner ratio should be 1:3.
A common grievance among other ranks in the CS, and this needs no special report to highlight, has been the low salary level which cannot sustain an officer over a fortnight given the high cost of living.
Many are driven to other forms of earning income to sustain their personal and family needs.
Unfortunately, some turn to illegal means to do that.

It would appear to be a common practice for a CS officer to trade favours with prisoners for prison rations or other favours from the prisoner’s relatives from the outside.
More dangerous is the discovery that there exists elaborate networks of crime syndicates which operate within prisons.

Criminals with the means pay off officers for privileges such as mobile phones
or for favours including providing the means for an escape.

The manner in which renowned criminal William Nanua Kapris and 11 other­s walked out of Bomana’s separate confinement unit is testimony to the existence of such a network.
He is back behind bars but his influence continues still and the syndicate exists.
How else would he have obtained sexual favours with a female warder without assistance as was reported most recently.

The CS is said to be the weakest link in the national security umbrella in the country.
It is important and urgent to patch this link up.

If hardened criminals were to escape from our prisons, the police, already stretched to the limit, would find it impossible to contain them.

It would be a nightmare for the peace-loving citizen while foreign investment would simply dry up.
Cost of living would sky-rocket as more and more money is spent on private security for lives and property protection.


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