Cox: Library jobs coming for prisoners

COMMUNICATIONS Minister Donna Cox said libraries are being put in all of the country's penal institutions, and inmates will be hired as on-the-job trainees to work in them.

She was contributing to the budget debate in the Senate on Thursday and delivering her maiden contribution as minister.

She said TT’s rate of recidivism is unacceptably high and many view the prison system as a revolving door, rather than a place of rehabilitation.

Cox said for this reason, the National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS) has ensured that there are libraries in the Women’s Prison, the Maximum Security Prison, the Youth Training Centre, and the Port of Spain Prison.

"During this fiscal year it is our intention to widen the scope to include a library at the Remand Yard at Golden Grove, the Eastern Correctional and Rehabilitation Centre at Santa Rosa, and the Tobago Prison."

She said that more than ensuring that libraries can be found in each penal institution, NALIS is working on a plan to ensure that sufficiently qualified and recommended inmates of these institutions are trained and employed under the OJT programme to provide library services while they are incarcerated.

"You and I have heard the horror stories of what happens to families when their loved ones, who were the previous breadwinners, become incarcerated.

"I want this Chamber to envisage for a minute the possibility of someone who is incarcerated earning a monthly stipend, with which they can still take care of their family. Moreover, envisage, for another minute, the possibility of that incarcerated person being able to help the family of his/her victim, whom they might have robbed of a breadwinner as well.

"That goes to the heart of restorative justice."

She said there is already one success story: a previous inmate of the Women’s Prison, having served her sentence, is now gainfully employed through the OJT programme at a public library in the east. She is doing "phenomenally well" and is a motivational speaker at NALIS-led outreaches.

Cox said the board of NALIS, in partnership with the Ministry of Community Development, Culture and the Arts, has pioneered the co-location of libraries in newly built community centres and already libraries can be found in the Mt Hope/Mt Lambert, Barataria and Beetham Gardens community centres.