Plans to step up prison security
A maximum security prison will be built at Montagne Posée next to the existing one and another put up on a different island for the rehabilitation of inmates.
Minister Joel Morgan – under whom the prisons portfolio now falls – said this at Montagne Posée on Saturday when he visited the prison, saw items taken from inmates and said he was not satisfied all dangerous and illegal items had been removed so the “clean-up operation will continue”.
The items included both long and small sharp knives, other piercing instruments, cigarettes and suspected drugs, mobile telephones and their chargers as well as buckets of locally brewed alcohol.
There were many damaged surveillance cameras but he said that did not reduce security because the prison is now under heavy guard by military and regular police since Wednesday when the items were removed in an operation that saw the police use teargas.
The Environment, Natural Resources and Transport minister was accompanied by the chief of defence forces Brigadier Leopold Payet, police commissioner Ernest Quatre and the newly appointed prisons superintendant Maxime Tirant.
He said a watch tower will also be built in a project being done by the Ministry of National Development.
Mr Morgan said the new maximum security prison will be used for hardened criminals as well as separating pirates on remand from Seychellois inmates. The other prison on a different island which he did not name will be expected to give inmates a chance to learn a skill like farming or carpentry so as to easily rejoin community life when their sentences are over.
Mr Morgan commended the prison’s guards who he said are too few but trying their best to work under difficult conditions but added their conditions need to be reviewed to make their terms of service attractive enough for more Seychellois to join them.
Source: NATION 2-1-10