Regardless to whether the photographs that were e-mailed to the media on the weekend were of the two inmates involved in the fatal prison break in January, or of prisoners at another time, they depict scenes that should never take place in Her Majesty’s Prison, especially because it is staffed with an abundance of men who wear the label “Rev” in front of their names.
The sight of naked, shackled men, lying on a tiled floor, is strictly from the mind of a horror oriented script writer, who seeks to get the best shock effect from an expectant audience. This is definitely not the thinking of the 21st century Bahamian, whose nation, according to the constitution, was founded on “Spiritual Values,” which lead some people to proclaim it a Christian Nation.
There is undoubtedly a need for an inquiry into the goings-on at the prison, but rather than squeezing the prison workers to find out the name of person(s) who took and distributed the photographs of those obviously beaten and broken men on the blood-stained floor, the investigation should be about exposing the mentally cretinous people who take it upon themselves to treat men as though they are meat for the slaughter.
Those photographs show explicitly that men in Fox Hill Prison are being treated in a manner to which no human being should be subjected. Those are the kinds of scenes that no journalist will be shown on a guided tour of the prison facilities. They would never be encountered by a minister of national security whose visits are pre-arranged, and areas to be inspected have been scrubbed beforehand and are smelling of bleach and pine scented antiseptic.
In a statement issued by Permanent Secretary Mark Wilson, he said: “The Ministry of National Security has been advised that there are allegations of photographs which purport to have been taken in Her Majesty’s Prison, Nassau, sometime following the return of the two escaped prisoners on Tuesday, January 17. The ministry is very concerned about these allegations and is currently investigating the truth of the allegations.”
The ministry should be concerned, just as every right thinking Bahamian citizen, many of whom have relatives among the almost 1,500 people who are locked away in those crowded cells at the Fox Hill prison. The ministry should be concerned because those photographs will tell the world that the treatment meted out to inmates in The Bahamas’ prison is on par with the brutality inflicted by the Americans on the Iraqi detainees at the Abu Grahib prison.
What the ministry should not be too concerned about is disciplinary action against the person who took the photographs and sent them out. That individual knew what was being done inside the prison was wrong and that the only way to avoid rhetorical answers and a possible cover-up was to expose the truth with irrefutable evidence. The heads that should roll when the truth comes out are the people in authority who knew what was going on and allowed it.
The Freeport News
