Virtual visits to remain suspended at prison

Relatives of inmates at Her Majesty Prisons Dodds will have a longer wait before they will be able to make contact with their love ones virtually.

Minister of Home Affairs, Information and Public Affairs, Wilfred Abrahams stated that virtual visits will continue to be suspended. He gave limited staff capacity at the prison as one reason why this was the case.

Abrahams spoke during Friday’s press conference held at the prison where he gave an update on the current COVID-19 situation there.

“We are trying to resume as many of the normal procedures as quickly possible because the aim is to make people comfortable. If people are comfortable then you get less issues in a prison setting. Right now, we do not have the staff capacity and because of the restrictions on movement, it is difficult to put those sort of things in place at this point in time.”

He added, “All of the non-essential services in the prison have been cut out entirely as the officers who are here have to manage every single thing, and it is difficult to police all of those aspects properly, and I am not prepared to sacrifice the security of the prison just to accommodate what is not an essential service. What we do and what we will continue to do, is try as much as we can to get the messages out, or if you contact us with a query about somebody in here, then with their permission we will update you as to their condition. That is the best that we can do now, but as soon as possible we will return to a normal state because that is what all of us want.”

Abrahams also stated that almost all of the inmates were allowed to make a telephone call home in recent times.

“There are 790 prisoners in Her Majesty Prisons Dodds, almost every person has been allowed a phone call home or to communicate with their relatives or their love ones. We have gotten a lot of feedback from persons calling to say thank you, or people messaging me to say thank you for letting their son or boyfriend or their husbands contact them. We have tried as much as we could to facilitate every single reasonable request during this period coming from a prison officer or even coming from the inmates in Her Majesty Prisons.”