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Opposition bemoans 'inhumane' conditions at correctional facilities

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Oposition Senator Donna Scott Mottley and Government Senator Sherene Golding Campbell
By Halshane Burke   
 
The opposition is bemoaning what it terms the inhumane conditions at correctional facilities across the island.
 
Member of the Joint Select Committee considering the Criminal Justice Bill Donna Scott Mottley says people who find themselves in any of the country's prisons are subjected to a life-altering experience. 
 
"The conditions cannot do anything but dehumanise that person. The person who is first apprehended and the person who you see three weeks later are simply not the same person. I think we have to look and see and I hope that we here will not judge Jamaica's state by the state of the prison because that would be an indictment on all of us, that we have allowed the social degradation of our country to reach the point where we are reflecting the prison conditions. That for me would be extremely sad," she lamented. 
 
"How many of our legislators have visited the prison and how many understand the extreme level of overcrowding and the inhumane conditions which presently exist? And how many of our legislators understand that with mandatory minimum, you are swelling the prison population?" she put forward. 
 
Senator Scott Mottley was speaking against the background of a mandatory minimum sentence being considered for capital murder.  
 
Government Senator Sherene Golding Campbell said the legislature and the executive should be called upon to improve the state of the nation's penal institutions. 
 
"In instituting mandatory minimum sentences, it is relevant what is going to happen to that offender when they enter the penal system because not all of them will sit there and die there. They are going to come back into society so we need to be concerned with what is happening in that process."
 
She suggested that the Joint Select Committee's report to Parliament should include its concern about the state of the penal system and recommendation for rehabilitative programmes to ensure people coming out of the system are not more of a danger to society than they went in.  
 


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