Dear Editor,
I hold no brief for anyone or group connected with the New Opportunity Corps yet I feel compelled to highlight some salient points because of what I knew that correctional facility had done for young persons who went there in the past. The facility at Onderneeming was established in 1879 as a juvenile prison. In the 19th century, the Superintendent of the Georgetown Prison had his deputy resident at Onderneeming at the juvenile prison. Despite its frequent name changes, the juvenile prison was administered in the hope of effecting behaviour change in deviant adolescent boys. Fast forward to the 20th century – June 12, 1981 – the facility became a co-educational institution under its present name, the New Opportunity Corps.
None of the students at the NOC are sent there by their parents or guardians. The courts of Guyana are the authority for committing deviant adolescents to the NOC. The court’s decision is usually premised on a written report done by a probation officer who is or is expected to be a trained social worker. There have been several instances when parents/guardians who having abrogated their parental responsibility over time have requested the magistrate to send their child to the correctional facility because they could not cope with him/her any longer. After all the evidence has been considered, the magistrate concurs with the probation report.
The NOC, boys’ school, girls’ school, juvenile prison authorities over the past 135 years have never had one hundred per cent success at social rehabilitation of all deviant adolescents who passed through the system. There have been successes but regrettably there also have been failures. There is no magic wand at the correctional facility to radically change all the deviant students in the two or three years he/she spends in incarceration. However, many residents of the facility have succeeded in attaining respectable positions in the society and have gone on to serve in law enforcement, the legal profession, family businesses, the military – local and overseas – the shipping and construction industries and the teaching profession. The institution’s records dating back as far as 1942 reveal their history and progress. Some have even departed this earthly life.
The challenges of the 21st century have not been kind to the present composition of staff at the NOC. At no time between 1979 and 2014 were there more than two trained professional social workers at Guyana’s juvenile correctional centre. Those NOC staff who now cope with what the courts send for rehabilitative training now bear the brunt of ridicule from every quarter. Yet they continue to cope with offences ranging from simple wandering to robbery with arms, aggravation, and manslaughter. Those persons who each year graduate from the University of Guyana with diplomas and degrees in social work do not gravitate to working with deviant adolescents because the pay is too small.
Public concern is understandable and well-intentioned, but there are many loopholes in the social fabric – broken homes, absent mothers and fathers and lack of support structures within our communities. These have contributed significantly to the deviance that we see with these young people. It is easy to blame the NOC, but this is not an NOC problem, this is a societal issue. We should all work together to get parents to fulfil their obligations of parenting and for our communities to be a safer and better place.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided
