Government begins training of new prison officer recruits

Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

Gov­ern­ment has launched a ma­jor re­cruit­ment dri­ve aimed at ad­dress­ing long­stand­ing staffing short­ages with­in the Trinidad and To­ba­go Prison Ser­vice, with 246 prison of­fi­cer re­cruits of­fi­cial­ly be­gin­ning train­ing on Tues­day.

Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der con­firmed the new in­take while re­spond­ing to ques­tions from Guardian Me­dia.

Alexan­der de­scribed it as a sig­nif­i­cant step to­ward strength­en­ing the coun­try’s cor­rec­tion­al sys­tem and re­duc­ing the heavy over­time bur­den car­ried by ex­ist­ing of­fi­cers.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter, the group com­pris­es 191 male and 55 fe­male re­cruits and rep­re­sents the first of two batch­es in a wider re­cruit­ment ex­er­cise that will bring 500 new prison of­fi­cers in­to the ser­vice.

The re­cruits will un­der­go a five-month train­ing pro­gramme, with all train­ing ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by March 2027.

Alexan­der said the ini­tia­tive forms part of the Gov­ern­ment’s broad­er ef­fort to im­prove op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy with­in the Prison Ser­vice by in­creas­ing man­pow­er and eas­ing pres­sure on cur­rent staff.

“This is long over­due, and what was very in­ter­est­ing was the in­ter­est these young men and women have to be­come prison of­fi­cers,” the Min­is­ter said.

The an­nounce­ment comes just days af­ter Alexan­der re­vealed that 800 prison of­fi­cers are ex­pect­ed to be re­cruit­ed be­tween this year and 2027, as the Gov­ern­ment moves to ad­dress per­sis­tent va­can­cies and the con­tin­ued loss of ex­pe­ri­enced of­fi­cers.

His pre­vi­ous com­ments came in re­sponse to con­cerns raised by Pres­i­dent of the Prison Of­fi­cers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go, Ger­ard Gor­don, who warned that at­tri­tion con­tin­ues to out­pace re­cruit­ment and that un­re­solved work­place is­sues are mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to re­tain of­fi­cers.

Be­yond in­creas­ing staffing lev­els, Alexan­der said the Gov­ern­ment is al­so plac­ing re­newed em­pha­sis on re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and the suc­cess­ful rein­te­gra­tion of in­mates in­to so­ci­ety.

“The Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and the Min­istry of Jus­tice will be work­ing hand in hand to­geth­er with the PAC­SO Unit of the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty, which was giv­en the man­date to bring about that change and move for­ward with a pur­pose­ful, fo­cused and peo­ple-cen­tred ap­proach as it re­lates to the re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and rein­te­gra­tion of per­sons, or in­mates, who would have served their sen­tences back in­to so­ci­ety with a more pos­i­tive ap­proach and at­ti­tude,” he said.

Alexan­der said the strength­ened part­ner­ship is in­tend­ed to im­prove not on­ly the staffing ca­pac­i­ty of the Prison Ser­vice but al­so the cor­rec­tion­al sys­tem’s abil­i­ty to pre­pare of­fend­ers for life af­ter in­car­cer­a­tion, re­duc­ing the like­li­hood of re­of­fend­ing and sup­port­ing safer com­mu­ni­ties.