Third time’s the charm, Hilary Herman learnt, as days into his third stint as director of the Bordelais Correctional Facility he is tasked with answering questions about an inconsistent story of a prison attack (see page 4). In last weekend’s issue, Herman spoke with the STAR about his ambitious plans for the jail and why they are necessary. Those included boosting security and providing rehabilitation within prison confinement for the hundreds of young men who pass through its walls.
This reporter sat with an ex-inmate recently and a young man’s memory of being jailed at 18 proves just how difficult Herman’s job will be in the coming years. Julien (not his real name) dove into the depths of the facility’s issues and why “correctional” should never be tied to the prison’s name.
Jail time is simple. When prisoners are brought in to Bordelais they go through admittance, have photos taken and receive a jail number. Each person is provided with one fitted bedsheet, a spork, a bowl or plate, a cup and a toothbrush. “They supposed to give you a sleeping bag but not everybody lucky enough,” Julien said.
Inmates are permitted one hour of recreational time outdoors and remain in their cell for the other 23. The inmate count as of last week was 503 which is just about the prison’s capacity. But when Julien left the facility in 2016, sometimes, he said, up to ten people could be in a four-man cell. Each cell is equipped with four beds (extra people use the floor) and squat toilet which doubles as a shower. Inmates use bottles of water and stand over the toilet for baths. Sometimes the water would run over onto the cell floor.
“Around Christmas time when it extra cold, you stick in that. It’s a fitted bed sheet so you have to move it on the mattress and fit yourself like a burrito,” Julien remembered. As for those who didn’t get a sleeping bag, the sheet was all they had for resting on the cold floors. Still, by Julien’s account, this is nothing compared to the animals that share the cell with inmates. “All in the walls you’d see little holes and night-time, roaches just running out of that. There are centipedes and a lot of different things. Certain times you’d see a centipede running you have to jump around and kill that, or it would run back in a hole. Centipedes would come out of the toilet, roaches too.” He mentioned the few occasions that inmates would be greeted by snakes too.
That insects feel so welcome, Julien attributes to the exceptional dirtiness of inmate living conditions. Inmates are responsible for cleaning their cells but Julien claims that resources are hard to access, “You’d have to plan and inform the officer that we want to clean our cell. They would have us out, they would organise scrubbing brush and sometimes bleach and certain things. But sometimes six fellas in a cell, we cannot be cleaning our cell once every four or five months. You want to keep it up but the officers not working with you. They’d tell you, ‘Where you feel you is? At your home? Jail you is.’”
Julien reflected on his past living conditions: “That’s not a place for any human being to be.”
He continued, “If there are 100 fellas in jail, probably 85 of them have lota [tinea versicolor] and skin infection because of the place. You coming there nice and you’re lucky if you don’t get a rash or something.”
Julien said that there are other health risks at Bordelais. The second highest, by his ranking, is the food. “The meat, majority of the time you could see blood in it. Once a bucket of tea fell on the road by accident. Six months it marked the road, I don’t know what it had in it. It stained the road and it wasn’t moving so I ban drinking that.” Julien added solemnly, “A lot of people were getting sick but you cannot tell if it’s the food.”
Julien also claims that the correctional officers have a part to play in health issues, especially if there is someone they choose to pick on. “There have fellas that have to go to the doctor. Those that after a beating their body hurting for how many weeks. Sometimes, depending on where the thing hit them, they get a zikak and all kinds of thing. There have those whose head hurting and always up and down medical. The thing about there, antibiotics is all they give and send you back to the cell until you fall down or something and they call the ambulance.”
He described the troubles one of his fellow unit-mates faced regularly. Once he suffered from an asthma attack and the officer at the time dismissed it until all the inmates in the unit began shouting at her, prompting her to finally call the medical unit. “She get up and make a call, the other officers come up they rush him to medical. But the man could have died just because of that stupidness,” Julien fumed.
He continued, “One time five officers enter the cell, they handcuff him, they brought him inside the officer cubicle, they shut the door so we couldn’t see what happening but we could hear every time the baton hitting him. They give him about eight lashes, and he’s a small fella, he have no size. They give him endless baton in the office there, you hear him screaming and all kind of thing. When he come back his body was bruised up and lumped.”
Julien understands that he was in a prison and inmates are there as punishment. But he insists that the correctional officers are given more power than they should have, “He troublesome and did a lot of things but y’all in no position to judge anybody or anything like that. You just getting paid to do a job. They would treat him so bad.”
“Who would you report to when you feel mistreated by an officer?” I asked. Julien let out a scoff, “The same officers that doing you things. Generally, officer just do what they want. That’s how it is there. Officers come like gods, like you supposed to fear them.”
According to Julien, correctional officers have a lot of leverage at their disposal, including being able to treat prohibited items as business opportunities, “A lot of time you pay police officers to bring in phones and drugs and things for you. And a lot of officers doing that. Don’t feel like 10% or 20. More like 60%. Sometimes 65%. They know that already, they cah stop it.”
Julien’s top recommendation to the prison director is to provide disinfectant. I challenged this, suggesting that it could be used as a weapon or the cause of suicide. Julien opposed, saying every prison expects that but it’s for the management to find a way, “They could put people in charge to watch us, give people jobs so we can clean our cell. Get pest control to walk around the jail and deal with all that because every cell have families of roaches. That’s roaches from some other part of the world.”
Among his other recommendations: “A lot of money so they could put proper food. Train the officers with communication skills, how to interact with people. They have to hire an entire new fleet cause it cannot work with the ones there. The director face should be around the facility more to know what going on. Cause they only come with their long sleeve white shirt and just walk around and watch. So the everyday officer just get to do whatever they want cause they have no punishment. It’s like another world cause nobody there to see nothing!”
The challenge, Julien claims, is not just physical. Young inmates especially suffer mentally and are expected to function normally after decades in remand.
Find out in next week’s STAR the psychological challenges faced in Bordelais, as an ex-inmate tells it.
