Another commission has been summoned. This time around the announcement was that it would be set up to make recommendations concerning proposed amendments to labour legislation. While this decision is perhaps innocuous, many Bahamians are today wondering how far Prime Minister, the Hon. Perry G., Christie intends to take this matter of commissions. There is a view that Commissions are being appointed where there is clear evidence of what needs to be done.
More realistically and infinitely less cynical is the perspective which suggests that Prime Minister Christie has used the device of the commission as a crafty stratagem, one designed to mollify supporters and at the same time get valued policy advice.
A third view which we have heard mooted is the idea that the commissions which have been created will, in time, serve as the nucleus for a series of action-oriented teams designed to get around a public sector bureaucracy which is bloated, wasteful and inefficient.
However, the matter of these commissions is ultimately resolved, the question today concerns their usefulness in a time when government is being pushed to become more efficient and better focused in its policies and actions.
A case in point serves to illustrate some of the challenges the government faces as it tries to persuade the attentive public that it has a grip on things. Some months ago, the government called on a number of people – some of them experts – to serve on a prison commission. Now that they have reported to the prime minister, the attentive public is still waiting to know what the government proposes to do about the appalling conditions facing workers and inmates at Her Majesty’s Prison, Fox Hill.
Indeed, many people – ourselves included – were not fully persuaded that there was a need for a commission to look at prison condition. Again, many very thoughtful Bahamians have always been of the view that it was always known that prison conditions were ugly and that little was done about the situation because of lack of will on the part of successive regimes.
An extremely illuminating perspective on this matter of will and action concerning prison conditions suggest that these will only change once the prison population itself changes. Translated, the pointed is that as long as the poor and uneducated were being incarcerated, there was no articulated demand for change. Marginalized individuals and groups – his perspective suggests – can be ignored for long periods of time, not so the affluent and the well educated. These people can and do make demands upon the system. And, invariably, they get action.
This theory predicts that as more middle class Bahamians are locked up, the greater the demand for improved conditions in the prison.
Whether or not these speculations are ultimately validated is for present purposes immaterial. What is germane to the current discussion about commissions is to figure out whether they are an expensive waste of time or whether they are playing a large role in ‘transforming’ Bahamian society.
The truth today is that the public is today in the dark concerning most of the issues surrounding the prison service in The Bahamas. While they may not know what the government proposes to do, most Bahamians are today wondering what the government will do now that they have been advised again that conditions are poor in the prison.
What makes the situation with the prisons particularly troubling is the suspicion some people now harbour namely that the government has neither the will nor the capacity to tackle the prison situation head on, thus the government’s waffling, delay and indecision.
Our view is that prison conditions have been allowed to fester for far too long. As such, therefore, the government should do the right thing and affirm and demand that prison conditions be cleaned up sooner rather than later. They can and should do the right thing.
Editorial, The Bahama Journal
