Ex-prisoner: I was told to write ‘happy thoughts’

FORMER prisoner Dane Manickchand said prison officials suppressed a letter he wrote to his mother while incarcerated.

He was speaking as the Joint Select Committee (JSC) on Social Services and Public Administration met with officials of the Prison Officers Association, Eye on Dependency programme, the Way of Holiness church, New Hope Prison Ministry and two reformed ex-offenders.

He said he wrote to his mother saying that he was feeling depressed.

“The prison suppressed the letter and carried me upstairs and told me, ‘Write happy thoughts.’ It’s still on my prison file, if anybody were to pull it today.”

He said the officials told him to make his mother feel everything was going well.

“I told them, ‘But I feel depressed. Do you feel happy every day?’” He also recalled when his mother died, officers told him not to cry or show emotion, because as a prisoner he might be considered “volatile.”

He said the prison was now hiring a psychologist.

“You could imagine persons with anger management, rage – who were they talking to before?”

He recalled he asked permission to write his victim an apology letter two years before he was released, but it took him two years to appeal, as two different superintendents said they were not willing to give permission, and wanted someone higher up to do it.

He said it was only when another superintendent came that he was told to write the letter and the new superintendent would read and mail it.

“I find prisons lack humanity, and prisoners should get more humanity in them. Because that’s what they lacked first of all, many of them, to go in there in the first place.”

Asked about the letter issue, Prisons Commissioner Gerard Wilson told Newsday the only letters that would not be allowed to leave were ones that jeopardised security.

“It is very strange that it would be suppressed,” he commented.

He said the issue should have been taken up with the welfare department and any such situation should have been investigated.

He added that if Manickchand had said he was depressed in a letter, the welfare department would have got involved and got him some help.

Manickchand, who was imprisoned for false imprisonment, told the JSC when he was incarcerated from 2002-2010 he was in prison, and not a “correctional facility.”

“It was a holding bay.” He said there were educational services, but it was inmates teaching other inmates, and it was a struggle to get things done.

He begged for new courses and faced a stumbling block because “somebody up the chain don’t agree.”

He added that while the commissioner might have a certain ideology, if it was not shared by the superintendent or the prison officer, it would not take place.