A History of Guyana’s Prisons

By Clare Anderson

Clare Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the history of prisons and penal colonies. She is the director of the project ‘Mental, Neurological and Substance Abuse Disorders in Guyana’s Jails, 1825 to the present day’.

 During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British built over a dozen jails all over its colony of British Guiana. This history has been the focus of a recently completed British Academy funded project between the University of Guyana and the University of Leicester, in partnership with the Guyana Prison Service. The project asked questions such as: What role did prisons play in the justice system historically? Why and how were men and women jailed in the past? Have experiences of incarceration changed? Can colonial experiments in prison discipline offer lessons that are useful for jail regimes today? In what ways were prisoners supported in rehabilitation and social reintegration, after they were released?

 We undertook extensive research on colonial-era records held in the national archives of both Guyana and the United Kingdom, where we discovered a rich history of continuity and change. There are lots of parallels between the past and the present, regarding a whole range of issues. Fundamentally, we come back to near-continual discussions of the question ‘what is prison for?’ And from that, again and again, we found that contemporaries discussed the same issues. These included the best way to punish inmates, how to cope with overcrowding, how to prevent unrest and escapes, and how to educate and train prisoners so that they were ready to return to society at the end of their sentence.

 New Amsterdam and Georgetown Prisons are the oldest operating prisons in Guyana. They were initially built during the period of Dutch occupation. Britain took them over, and later extended them, after the colonies of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo were ceded to the United Kingdom in 1814. Next, the British constructed an isolated prison that they called Her Majesty’s Penal Settlement (HMPS) Mazaruni, near Berbice, in 1843. From the 1830s these three institutions were joined by numerous other district prisons, along with several ‘lock-ups’ in the more remote regions of the colony. Today, only three of the colonial-era prisons remain in use. These are: New Amsterdam, Georgetown, and Mazaruni. The government of Guyana built the other two modern institutions, Timehri and Lusignan, following Independence.

 Other than the fact that the question of the purpose of imprisonment was never really resolved, one of the other key findings of the project was that the history of Guyana’s jails is intertwined with the history of enslavement, labour, and population management. During the era of slavery, of course, the owners of enslaved persons punished their human property for what they perceived as labour infractions or ill-discipline, often using extremely brutal measures. After emancipation, in effect, the colonial state took on this role, and this was the background to the development of the prison estate. Emancipated slaves and others, including indentured labourers, were imprisoned for a range of offences. These included crimes against property, but also things such as idleness and vagrancy, and breaches of increasingly strict labour laws.

 Our research also found that both the architectural design of and the daily regime instituted in Guyana’s prisons, were strongly influenced by changing European and American thinking about their ideal form and function. Colonial institutions, including for women and juvenile offenders, were constructed and run according to ‘modern’ prison design. Ideally, prisoners would occupy individual cells, and would be punished and rehabilitated through a programme of education, work training, and Christian instruction. One notable feature of 19th-century punishment was that British used prisoners in colonial building projects. This included the building and repair of streets and pavements, and the construction of parts of the Sea Wall. The British even drafted prisoners from Mazaruni to Georgetown expressly for the latter purpose. But prisons contained echoes of the historical past too. They could be violent places, in which in practices reminiscent of slavery prisoners who refused to submit to the regime could be chained or flogged. Exceptionally, Georgetown had a treadmill, which punished prisoners physically without deriving economic benefit from them.

 From the very earliest days, the 1820s onwards, the desire to reform and rehabilitate prisoners was frustrated by a lack of resource and difficulties in recruiting guards and other personnel. In isolated Mazaruni, for instance, far inland from Georgetown near what was then the mission station of Bartica, there even erupted various scandals where it emerged that prisoners had been beaten and otherwise mistreated during acts of colonial violence. This led to the establishment of a Board of Prisons in 1862, and the appointment of an Inspector General of Prisons from 1879. Increased regulation had a positive impact, for instance the introduction of tickets-of-leave (probation) was an effective tool for the rehabilitation and resettlement of prisoners.

 The picture was not entirely positive, however. The British used different jails for different purposes (e.g. for debtors, petty offenders, hard labour prisoners), but when they held other prisoners they became overcrowded, and this put a strain on prisoner training, education and work. Guards often left employment, or retired early, due to stress and overwork.

 For all these reasons, it is no exaggeration to say that the roots of the modern jails regime in Guyana is firmly located in the country’s colonial past. Our project has revealed some of the historical factors that might be appreciated by the country today. All nations confront the issue of why and how we incarcerate our fellow citizens; Guyana is no exception. An awareness of what happened historically, and what has and has not changed, enables us to critically reflect on how best we can do justice to both the perpetrators and the victims of crime.