ICT equipment donated to GPS to help reform prisoners, digitise data

The Attorney General’s Chambers has donated assorted electronic equipment to the Guyana Prison Service as part of its mandate to help promote information and communications technology (ICT) education in the penitentiaries.

Further, the gesture is to lend support to the plans of the prison service to improve the electronic gathering of criminal and other information to gradually move away from the manual inputting and retrieval of information related to the criminal justice system.

The items, which included 100 desktop computers, 10 laptop computers, four Wi-Fi routers, four laserjet printers, and five projectors with screens, were handed over on Monday.

In giving the gadgets, Attorney General Anil Nandlall, SC, urged the prison to take good care of the devices to ensure longev- ity and to use them for their intended purpose.

Nandlall explained that the criminal justice system has many important agencies under its umbrella, including the Judiciary, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the Guyana Police Force (GPF), and the Guyana Prison Service (GPS).

According to the Senior Counsel, the donation is part of the Support for the Criminal Justice System (SCJS) Programme which is funded by the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) and being executed by the Attorney General’s Chambers. He said that the core objective of the SCJS programme is to reduce the prison population. And this, he highlighted, includes the exploration of avenues other than custodial sentences as a sanction for the commission of crimes.