Supt Wayne Jackson: the last interview

The interview below took place in the late Supt Wayne Jackson’s office in the Maximum Security Prison (MSP) on September 27.

Jackson was shot dead outside his Malabar home about 7.30 pm on October 2.

IN the raging sea of crime that engulfs us, Wayne Jackson ran a tight ship. Behind the high concrete walls of Maximum Security Prison (MSP) capped with rows of spiralling razor wire, the late superintendent, always optimistic and uplifting, insisted on discipline, efficiency, order and fairness. He also left time for joy and celebrations – like the one captured on a cellphone video of MSP’s debate team returning victorious after the final prison inter-station debate on September 19.

“When I visited Golden Grove Remand before your debate, I told the officers there we will win," he says to MSP debaters. After a string of praise, he leads his debaters in a fist-raising tribute, “Hip-hip--hooray! Hip-hip-hooray!” They beam with joy.

He smiled at the video.

“I told the guys through debating, they discovered a God-given talent, which ultimately resulted in success, and they could use those skills to have proper dialogue with people and to engage in a form of mediation when they return to society.”

Always looking poised, fit and trim in a perfectly tailored prison uniform, Jackson commanded everyone’s attention when he walked into a room. Even his tidy office reflected his penchant for perfection.

Asked to describe himself Jackson said, “...an all-rounder. I’m a senior prison officer, a disciplinarian, but I also know how to make people laugh. The inmates know I am the superintendent, but there’s another side of me. The inmates appreciate that.”

He used his humour to defuse situations between inmates and even officers and inmates.

“I’m also artistic, I’m a calypsonian – not a professional – but in prison officers’ competition.”

At the last Emancipation Day celebration in MSP, Jackson, dressed in a brown and orange dashiki with African print, sang Bob Marley’s Africa Unite in perfect pitch as he chipped and danced his way into a bobbing audience. He smiled at that video too as he gently warned an assistant who had come to search a few small piles of neatly stacked files on his desk.

“Just don’t mix them up,” he said.

He took pride in MSP’s “vibrant” programmes department, which offers more programmes than any other prison: religious, cultural, academic – CXC and CAPE.

But MSP still proved a challenge.

“I try to develop a good relationship with the inmates, he said. “They have my support 100 per cent. Once they behave, Mr Jackson is going to give them everything legally possible to make their stay here comfortable.

“I try to instil an atmosphere of positivity, in addition to getting things done. If there’s a problem, don’t tell me what happened in the past: tell me how we’re going to get it fixed. Once you are alive and have health, nothing is impossible.”

On September 1, Jackson celebrated “30 sweet years in the prison system – action-filled, satisfying, and sad sometimes,” he said. “Some people may feel we’re crude or inhumane sometimes, but we try.”

And he was committed, “I try to be a father figure to inmates. I pay attention to those who give trouble and try to get into their heads. It impacts me greatly when I read in the newspapers that someone got killed. Sometimes I feel I really reach certain inmates while they are here, but due to their history, they don’t last out there.”

At MSP, Jackson supervised a prison with a population that hovers around 1,237 inmates, 700 of them on remand often waiting ten years or more for their trials to crawl through the justice system.

It was a long, circuitous route to his post. He had worked in the prison programmes department, prison administration, and the discipline section at Golden Grove and Carrera. A week before he returned from vacation this year, he was told he would run MSP, a prison he had been familiar with because in 1994 he was part of a transition team to oversee the management and policy operations there. He became superintendent of MSP on February 24.

“I had a stint in this prison as a young officer from 1994 to 2009,” he said.

Jackson had “mixed thoughts” about his appointment.

“The MSP I knew and was part of in my younger days was not the MSP that I was hearing about. There were discipline problems now, very serious incidents between officers and inmates, inmates and inmates. The basic operational processes were not being carried out.

“However, I was glad for the opportunity to try to bring back MSP to what it ought to be, glad to try to reduce the amount of violence and conflicts.

“There has been some degree of success. I don’t want to speak too fast, but we have not had the type of bloody incidents or extreme violence lately.”

He worked Monday through Saturday, beginning at 8.30 and leaving about 7.30 pm.

The assistant searching the files interjected: “Sometimes 10 pm.”

Jackson credited some of his success to MSP’s programmes, including Clayton Morris’s FUTSAL programme; the continuation on a regular basis of weekend family visits – “you have to be on good behaviour for this” – and swift justice in terms of disciplinary action that included “night court.” Supervisors handle discipline; the more grievous cases went to Jackson. At 5 pm, officers brought inmates who violated the rules.

“I would try the matter, hearing both sides, and decide. Sometimes inmates won their cases; some got warnings or suspended sentences. The number of cases steadily declined from about five per week to two. I started this in Carrera, and my nickname became ‘Night Court'," Jackson laughed.

On that Thursday when Jackson spoke, he said, apparently prophetically, he would like to be remembered as “a person or an officer who tried to have a positive impact on officers and inmates– Officers: by my work ethic and attitude. I would like them to be the ultimate professionals and have a positive impact on inmates.

“I’d like to be remembered as someone who had a positive impact on inmates. I know their time inside here is hard, “but I tell inmates all is not lost. Once there’s life and health, change is possible and the sky’s the limit.”

In the prison system, Supt Wayne Jackson was a much admired and respected leader. In the sea of violence that engulfs us, he stayed the course until the bitter end.