By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrolle@tribunemedia.net

GOVERNMENT is seeking to reintroduce the Swift Justice programme to help speed up court cases, National Security Minister Wayne Munroe said yesterday.

He also revealed that the government is hoping to form a task force in the first quarter of next year to deal with the backlog of criminal cases.

“Justice must be delivered, but justice must also happen on a timely basis,” Mr Munroe told reporters yesterday before going to a Cabinet meeting.

“Swift Justice was just a moniker that the previous PLP administration used.”

“ Clearly it wasn’t liked by the Minnis administration that replaced us. There wasn’t such a focus on it.

 “We’re refocusing on it. And, as I say, we have arranged to have a meeting with the Chief Justice and senior justices in charge of the criminal division, we’ve agreed to have a task force to look at it - and speed it up even more - little, small things that may make a huge difference.”

 This comes as people out on bail continue to be murdered.

 According to The Tribune’s records, there have been 127 homicides confirmed so far for the year, with many of those victims said to be alleged offenders.

Court officials have sought to get firearm trials completed within 21 days after arraignments to help prevent people being killed while out on bail.

 Yesterday, Mr Munroe said he was told the process in this regard was still ongoing, adding: “We haven’t had as great a success in other aspects of it, but certainly the speeding up of firearms trials, I’m told, is going ahead.”

 He also noted that the government is focused on rehabilitation to ensure that inmates can be properly integrated into society to become productive citizens after release.

 “I have seen over my career, young people who went ahead and for minor things, now being involved in much more serious crime and involved in gangs,” Mr Munroe added. “So, the first step is to stop the prison becoming a school for criminals. That is very important because 98 percent of the people will get out.

 “And, so we’re moving to seek to be accredited as a correctional institution. The concept of a correctional institution is to correct your behaviour, to correct the behaviour that brought you to the institution and so we’re moving to improve the conditions so that you can’t have somebody with influence being able to recruit people because he couldn’t get them water, because he can get them food, things that they should have anyway.”

 He continued: “These are the tools being used to recruit people in our prisons, to street gangs, we must eliminate those and that, of course, we have to prepare the person for that eventual release. If the person went in marginal, they’re going to come out with a criminal conviction, they’re going to have this advantage. So, we are seeking to upskill them so they will have a chance at fitting back in when they come out.”

 The minister also said the Davis administration is also working to introduce a system of parole where prisoners will “be accountable for every day that you’re sentenced.’

 He added: “Even if you get out four months early, if you commit an offence on that day, you will go back to prison to serve those four months because you’ve decided that you don’t want to behave and so we’re gonna be trying to hold people more accountable for their behaviour.”

 This will require the enactment of new legislation, Mr Munroe said, calling it the Parole and Re-entry Act.

 “There’s a draft after the committee reported in 2016. With the change of government, it wasn’t pursued. The committee was chaired by Archdeacon Gomez and Reverend Patrick Paul. It did a lot of work looking at systems in the US and then the Caribbean islands around us and it’s a product that is at the point that it can be rolled out,” he noted.