Candidates interviewed for top prisons job

A new director for the Cayman Islands’ prison system could be chosen by next week, according to officials within the government agency responsible for overseeing operations of the islands’ prisons.  

Interviews of five candidates will begin on Thursday, 7 March, and Portfolio of Internal and External Affairs Chief Officer Eric Bush said he hoped to present a final candidate for approval to Deputy Governor Franz Manderson by “early next week”.  

Mr. Bush said the process was sped up a bit from the original schedule because earlier decisions to seek an interim prison boss from the United Kingdom had fallen through.  

“All of the candidates we looked at had scheduling problems or just weren’t suitable,” Mr. Bush said. “But the [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] is still very interested in assisting us with our prisons.”  

The five job hopefuls are a “mixture of local and overseas candidates,” Mr. Bush said. They are vying to replace retired prisons director Dwight Scott, who officially left the post last month after taking accrued vacation leave.  

Several problems were revealed during the past two years within Northward men’s and Fairbanks women’s prisons, many of which were reported in the local media.  

Those incidents included: the strip search of three teenage prisoners at Fairbanks women’s prison in December 2010; a government financial audit that found numerous examples of inadequate record keeping for expenses and mismanagement of prison construction projects; an incident where ganja was found within the prison administration building; an incident where a prison officer was beaten up trying to retrieve ganja that was thrown over the fence at Northward; and a case where a “low-risk” prison inmate left the Northward compound and returned an hour later with a woman.  

Reports of ganja use openly and blatantly within the prisons, particularly at Northward, was well-documented in the recently released inspectorate review completed by the UK prisons service.  

Among other concerns, the prisons inspectorate report found “high numbers of prisoners arrived at Northward either with drug or alcohol problems and our survey found that a further 13 per cent developed a problem while in prison”.  

To cut down on the use of illicit substances within Northward, Mr. Bush said prisons officials have put a ban on cigarette “rolling papers” – often called “rizla papers” – for prisoners. Previously, these were brought in, along with cigarettes and other items by prison visitors.  

“We’ve banned the sale of them [at the prison shop] and restricted people from handing them into the prison,” he said, meaning that there would be no “amnesty” for individuals who turned in such items.  

Billy Adam, who has been speaking to prisons officials about the issue of allowing rolling papers for some time, said he was also encouraged that the prisons would now seek to make possession of these items an offence.  

“The facilitation by the prison authorities of allowing the hand in … continues to encourage and facilitate the crime of using ganja in the Cayman Islands and shows the utter futility of the [police service] and the courts going through the motions, at great expense, in an attempt to control the use of ganja,” Mr. Adam wrote in an e-mail last month to prisons officials.  

Mr. Bush said the ultimate plan was also to ban the sale and use of cigarettes within the local prisons by 2014, but the ban on rolling papers was something that officials thought could be implemented immediately.  

A committee comprised of senior prison staff has been consulting with stakeholders such as the Ministry of Health, the Health Services Authority’s Public Health Department and the National Drug Council to see how to best institute the policy in the prison system. 

“Maybe I’m a bit insensitive since I’m not a smoker, but I just don’t see the need for [rolling papers], especially when they are used for smoking marijuana,” Mr. Bush said.