EDITORIAL - The Dickensian shame of Armadale

EDITORIAL - The Dickensian shame of Armadale
Published: Monday September 14, 2009
In a sense, the Armadale enquiry wasn't really necessary. It wasn't going to tell us anything that we didn't know. Most Jamaicans know about the horrible conditions at the so-called correctional centres and places of safety.
Sadie Keating's committee earlier this decade, for instance, documented rampant sexual and physical abuse at both government and privately run homes where children ought to believe they have bankable guarantees of refuge and well-being.
We are aware, too, of the beatings and torture in 2000 at the prison in St Catherine, and the findings of the sole commissioner who probed that atrocity. Before these, there was the report on the riots at the Tower Street Correctional Centre that highlighted the overcrowding at the prison, the ill-treatment of prisoners, and the general corruption of the system.
But even though there would be no grand revelations from Justice Harrison's probe of the events in May at Armadale, St Ann, where seven of the inmates of this facility for girls were burnt to death, we knew that it was important that we hear what happened and the circumstances in which it happened. For it is important, we feel, continuously to confront ourselves and to test our tolerance for indecency until, perhaps, we are at a point where we can no longer endure and, therefore, shame ourselves into action - to a behaviour for the better.
A degrading Dickensian hellhole
In the first regard, the enquiry did not disappoint, confirming Armadale as a degrading Dickensian hellhole for which no one, from top to bottom and in-between, assumes any responsibility and has no expectation of being held to account. Unless, perhaps, Justice Harrison deems someone criminally liable for starting the fire that caused the deaths and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions prefers charges against that individual.
But igniting the fire that caused the deaths and injuries was not the worse thing that happened at Armadale. The fire, the raw truth be acknowledged, was mere symptomatic of something far nastier and more corrosive than what is likely to have been a case of bad judgement: it is a toxic cocktail of abrogation of responsibility and indecent disrespect. So people who find themselves in a particular circumstance or are hemmed into a certain stratum are worthy, it appears, of not more than a Dickensian workhouse.
Psychotic behaviour
Should such an assertion be deemed unfair, how else then is the evidence of Dr Micas Campbell, who attended to the Armadale girls, explained?
Several of the 61 wards, she said, displayed various forms of psychotic behaviour, including hallucination and suicidal and homicidal tendencies. Some were particularly aggressive. Some suffered from depression and anxiety. But the State, in whose care they were placed, which had responsibility for their welfare, could not find it possible to ensure that teenage girls with deep psychological problems receive prescribed medication on a regular basis. Nor could Dr Campbell get two girls, with deeper problems, complicated by diagnosis of HIV, removed from Armadale. They died in the fire.
That attitude is symptomatic of a culture in which what happened at Armadale in May was entirely possible. What is worse, no one at any level of the system seems to feel responsible, which makes them irresponsible, and should go, starting at the top of the correctional system.
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