Government has spent about ten million dollars on the Bordelais Correctional Facility (BCF) this year in an effort to secure the prison, Home Affairs Minister Dr. Virginia Albert-Poyotte said this week.
Since it was built in 2003, the 48-million-dollar facility has not had any major repairs.
Said Albert-Poyotte: “This institution has been around for almost twenty years and it has never received any serious infrastructural work in terms of repairs. Many things were falling apart, the place is exposed to the sea blast and a lot of things were getting rusty; this government under the leadership of the prime minister has committed quite a bit of funds.”
“Government (has) started work to secure the outer fence at Bordelais which cost close to six million dollars. We are actually halfway within this financial year and we can say that we have spent about ten million dollars at Bordelais to put in a number of security measures and to give the correctional officers the tools they need to carry out their work properly,” she added.
Over the years, BCF has had to deal with a number of security issues. Last month, Elwin Lansiquot, a prisoner at BCF managed to evade the authorities and escape the facility, albeit briefly.
The joint effort of BCF’s Special Operations Response Team and the Royal Saint Lucia Police Force Special Services Unit resulted in the early recapture of Lansiquot who was on the run for thirty-eight hours. (Lansiquot was apprehended in Praslin and was subsequently escorted to the Dennery Police Station where he was handed over to police for further investigation.)
“There are a number of initiatives that we are taking… we are looking at… using a lot of intelligence to fight crime and we want to accelerate and expand what we call community policing where people don’t see the police as a threat but more as a partner in keeping the country safe and secure. We want to begin to refine a lot of what we are doing in administering justice,” the minister told reporters.
According to Albert-Poyotte, “when this government came in… we found that a number of (police officers) were recruited without any training… when we discovered that government immediately put some allocation in the budget… to train police officers. We have seen that training officers to carry out their work is critical.”