Colonel Lamb: Westgate is not a 'soft option' for cons

“Anyone who thinks prison is soft should come spend a week at Westgate and I will tell you what to wear, when to sleep, where to go and what type of toothpaste you can have,” he told the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Violence and Gun Crime yesterday.

Robust

“Liberties we take for granted are not available at Westgate.

“Any person well versed in the criminal system will tell you they don’t go to jail to be punished. Being in jail is punishment.

“I’ve been to many jails in Canada and England and our systems are just as robust.

“They do have recreation but they have it when we tell them.

“They do what they are told when we tell them — deprivation of liberty is the punishment.

“If you think Westgate is a soft option, talk to inmates and ask if they are going back to jail.”

Asked about the perception that criminals needed to serve ‘hard time’, Col. Lamb said the public gave out mixed messages when it came to punishing criminals.

He added: “This community doesn’t know what it wants. It wants us to punish everybody else’s boy.”

He said a grandmother had spoken at a recent public meeting and told him he needed to bring back the cat-o-nine-tails, saying: “Whip them on the way in, whip them while they are there and whip them on the way out.”

He claimed he ran into the same woman several weeks later and she told him her grandson  was in Westgate. “I said, ‘Oh, do you want me to whip him for you?’ She said no, she wanted to know if she could bring him gingerbread, cookies and his pyjamas.”

Col. Lamb said people wanted prison officers to provide the discipline for criminals that they should have provided for them as youngsters. He added that the whole community was to blame for the escalation in crime.

Bickering

He said: “Young men who are locked up are broken spirits — we broke them.

“Stop the bickering, stop setting a bad example to our children, stop saying, ‘It’s not my child, it’s not my problem.’ Reach out to someone else’s child.”

He said Corrections is doing its bit to turn people’s lives around.

An average of 20 inmates per year pass their GED and social workers help them to find jobs and apartments when they are paroled.

Many are put through anger management counselling or case specific programmes before they are released.

Col. Lamb said: “We are doing a good job finding the balance between safety, security and rehabilitation.”

Reoffending rates are currently hovering at about 50 per cent — lower than the U.K. or the U.S.

Col. Lamb accepted this is still high but he said the prison could only do so much.

He added: “Some of them have nowhere to go, they’ve burnt so many bridges.

“We clean them up they go back to their ace boys, next thing they are burning up a spliff and are back on drugs again.

“As a community, we have to recognize that we have a vested interest in ensuring these young men get jobs and apartments.”

He said the prison’s halfway house was helping to deal with the issue but the community as a whole needed to do more to help former inmates.

He said the community had failed young men and did not have the right to call them ‘thugs’.

He added that many inmates said they did not feel loved.

Col. Lamb said: “We’ve neglected to teach them respect, neglected to show them love, neglected to teach them discipline, neglected to teach them Godliness, neglected to teach them moral values.”