Remand yard–an oven for mental illness

Prison overcrowding is a likely cause of “depression, agitation and violence among inmates,” said the Psychiatrists’ Association’s Dr Dominic Nwokolo, citing foreign data that 25 per cent of inmates have mental illness. Yet the authorities are sharply divided on how to detect and treat mental illness in TT’s prisons, a joint select committee (JSC) of Parliament learnt yesterday.

Prisons Supervisor (Infirmary) John Lopez said 4.03 per cent of inmates are under psychiatric care.

Ex-prisoner/activist Wayne Chance described the Remand Yard as an “oven for creating mental illness and depression.”

Yet the hearing repeatedly heard that fears for inmates’ mental health was based on anecdote and foreign studies, as local data is lacking. Acting Commissioner of Prisons William Alexander said, on entry to jail, inmates were not assessed mentally, so no baseline data existed to track their state throughout their stay. Vision on Mission CEO Gordon Husbands urged that all prisoners should be screened upon entry.

Nwokolo retorted that assessing an inmate is a long-term act, unless he is withdrawn, refusing to eat and self-harming.

St Ann’s Hospital head Dr Indar Ramtahal said a diagnosis needs a team of psychiatrists plus a 500-item questionnaire but bemoaned that, in TT’s jails now, a general practitioner (GP) simply uses his own acumen to pick up signs of mental illness.

While Alexander said a cellmate’s complaint may put an inmate under probe, Husbands insisted, “There must be a standard procedure.” He urged a proper mental profile for each inmate while admitting that was costly and needed a trained staff.

Alexander said the Prison Service had psychologists and psychiatrists but an inmate’s usual contact was with prison officers (who got some training at St Ann’s). He said officers went beyond the call of duty to sit down and counsel inmates and to reunite them with their families.”The work that goes on behind prison walls, people are unaware of.”

Ramtahal said even GPs and psychiatrists made wrong diagnoses, so it was grossly unfair to expect prison officers to diagnose inmates. Yet Nwokolo said a layman could usually detect significant mental illness, especially with scant resources stopping mass screening. Ramtahal lamented an absence of testing like CAT-scans and MRI on inmates’ brains and was endorsed by Husbands.

The panel disagreed on prison conditions. Chance likened the remand system to an oven that provoked mental ill-health, but Nwokolo said Remand Yard conditions were ten times better than St Ann’s. Alexander said Remand Yard offered schooling, music and sport, with 41 men doing CSEC exams. With a $54 million allocation to renovate Remand, he said a purpose-built prison could make a “big difference.”

Saying a child’s love can calm an inmate’s hostility, he said, “We’ve seen some hard nuts change and get baptised and are now living a different life. Love is still the greatest healer.”

He said inmates were sent from Remand Yard to the Maximum Security Prison so as to increase their airing time from one hour to three to four hours daily. Asked about prison rape, Alexander said that was a horrible act that interfered with a man’s masculinity. He said ironically overcrowding had curbed such incidents. “Prisoners frown on two types of people in jail: rapists and child-molesters.”

Husbands revealed the dire effect that imprisonment had on an inmate’s children. “The impact is very grievous.

A lot go through grief and loss and being secretive because they don’t want people to know where their mother or father is.” Inmates’ children are at risk of becoming school bullies, delinquents, and targets of domestic abuse and human trafficking, and running away.

Husbands added such children were, ultimately, more likely to be jailed as adults, yet no tracking was done on their lives.