Jamaica’s correctional facilities are failing to adequately rehabilitate prisoners, possibly leading to a high rate of re-offending. That’s according to a recent performance audit conducted by the Auditor General’s Department.
The audit finds that rehabilitation is especially lacking for sex offenders, drug abusers and the mentally challenged.
The Department of Correctional Services, DCS, is responsible for managing seven adult prisons, including one remand center and four juvenile institutions.
Collectively, they house over 4-thousand inmates. The system is supposed to be designed not only as punishment for those who break the law.
But as the name implies, a correctional centre is a place where persons can be rehabilitated to keep them from committing similar offenses in the future.
But according to the AG’s report, that’s not happening. The report says the breakdown begins from the moment a prisoner enters the system.
The DCS is supposed to evaluate each inmate and develop a risk profile, highlighting their rehabilitation needs. However, a sample taken by the AGD shows that only about 30-percent are actually assessed.
This, despite the fact that the DCS employs five officers full time to conduct assessments. Each officer should be able to do three assessments per day, meaning up to three-thousand nine-hundred inmates, or almost the entire prison population, could be assessed annually.
The report says that lack of assessment at the very beginning, could be responsible for other problems in the prison system. For example, many low risk inmates are being housed at severely overcrowded maximum security facilities, when they could have been transferred to medium and low security facilities, which are only about half full.
The study finds that in 2012, only 59-percent of inmates participated in any type of rehabilitation activity. Such activities include educational and vocational programmes, as well as assisting in the operation of the facility by cooking, cleaning and performing general maintenance.
For those who did participate, there was no evidence the DCS ever assessed the effectiveness of the programmes on the inmates. The situation is even worse for sex offenders, drug abusers and the mentally challenged.
The audit found that apart from a Chaplaincy Unit that offers counseling, there is no structured rehabilitation programme designed for these categories of inmates. Of 12 sex offenders identified, only three were participating in a rehabilitation programme, raising concerns that they could re-offend when their sentence is complete. The single bright spot in the audit is the DCS’s handling of rehabilitation for juveniles.
The Auditor General’s Department says all juveniles in the system were found to be participating in an educational or vocational programme, in addition to recreational rehabilitation and counseling. However, the quality of that education was called into question last month by the National Education Inspectorate, which gave all four juvenile institutions a failing grade.
The lack of rehabilitation for inmates could be part of the reason that more than 1 in 2 ex-convicts end up re-offending. It’s a figure that’s disguised by the DCS’s method of calculating the number of re-offenders, which puts it closer to 1 in 4.
The DCS does not include non-custodial sentences when classifying re-offenders.
But the AG’s Department says if those sentences are counted, the recidivism rate increases to 51-percent.
