Report on Prison Conditions in Jamaica
It is submitted that, as regards domestic law, the egregious conditions of detention suffered by the inmates at SCACC, TSACC and HARC breach the prohibition on inhuman and degrading treatment in Section 17 of the Jamaican Constitution, and certain specified provisions of the Corrections Act, and the Correctional Institution (Adult Correctional Centre) Rules 1991. As regards international obligations, the current conditions are clearly in breach of Articles 7 and 10 of the ICCPR, Article 5 of the ACHR, and many specific provisions of the SMR. Tis conclusion is informed and contextualized by a growing body of international jurisprudence (in which the SMR has played an increasingly important interpretative role) where prison conditions have been found to breach the prohibition on inhuman and degrading treatment.39
It is important, however, not just to make legal observations, but also to ask why Jamaican inmates and detainees face such a situation, and what can be done to improve their day to day existence. Tis is so not least because if the prevailing conditions remain, the threat of unrest and violence will continue to hang constantly above the heads of Jamaican prisoners and correctional staff alike. In this regard, it is worth recalling the words of the Woolf Inquiry into the Strangeways riots in the UK, which led to widespread reforms of the English penal system.
A large proportion of the prisoners in Strangeways prison were sympathetic to the instigators of the disturbance and antagonistic towards the prison service because of the conditions in which they were housed. Tose conditions were, as far as the vast majority of inmates were concerned, regarded as being wholly unacceptable and inhumane. As the inmates repeatedly told the inquiry, if they were treated like animals, they would behave like animals. Te prison was overcrowded and the inmates were provided with insufficient activities and association. Te inmates were spending too long in their cells without sanitation and without the opportunity at reasonable frequency to bathe and change their clothes, including their underwear.
Tese words were quoted by Vivien Stern at a conference entitled ‘Improving Prison Conditions in the Caribbean’ as long ago as 1991.40
Reading the description of the
conditions at SCACC given at that conference, it is clear that very little has changed over the past 20 years. Te terrible conditions in Jamaican prisons have remained, and as a result the lives of many Jamaican inmates and correctional staff have been lost in avoidable incidents in the interim. Reports and enquiries have an important role to play in bringing the state of the Jamaican penal system to wider public attention. However, they can only go so far in the absence of genuine political and financial commitment to reform. Shortly after this report was completed, the report of the Commission of Enquiry into the incident on 22nd May 2009 at the Armadale Juvenile Detention Centre, which resulted in the deaths of seven young female remandees, was made
39 See for instance Peers v Greece (2001) 33 EHRR 1192, Kalashnikov v Russia (2003) 34 EHRR 36, and in the UK Napier v Scottish
Ministers [2005] 1 SC 229. 40
Improving Prison Conditions in the Caribbean: Report and Papers from a Conference, Caribbean Rights & Penal Reform International, December 1991.
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