Incarceration a last resort for juveniles

REHABILITATION NOT INCARCERATION is the strength of Guyana’s Juvenile Justice
Programme disclosed Ms. Joan Edghill-Stuart, its Deputy Director in an exclusive with
www.aroundtheregions.com
Also known as alternative sentencing, rehabilitation under the programme seeks to reduce
sentencing severity faced by juvenile offenders and provide them second opportunities to
become law-abiding citizens.
“The Juvenile Justice programme will see us seeking to have incarceration as a last resort,”
Edghill -Stuart said.
“The law stressed rehabilitation, education and reintegration So it’s to rehab, to educate and to
reintegrate. Those are the steps.”
She reminded that the 2018 Juvenile Justice Act which repealed the Juvenile Offenders Act and
the Training Schools Act, no longer charges those young persons with truancy offenses in the
country’s 10 Administrative Regions. Ranks of the Guyana Police Force, Toshaos, Community
Policing Groups (CPGs), social workers and probation officers among other categories of skilled
and resource persons received training to help ensure they grasp the spirit and intention of the
new law and how it is intended to be enforced.
“In instances where Magistrates have found them guilty and they need to be admitted to a closed
residential facility, for instances, for murder, programmes will be running in those facilities…to
ensure that juveniles are rehabilitated,” the Deputy Director explained.
While incarcerated, juveniles will be taught a wide range of technical, vocational, employment
and life-skills to help reintegrate them into the wider society. In addition, the more gifted will
also received tutoring to write the regional Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC)
tests offered by the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC).

“As a matter, for the past two years, we have had juveniles who wrote the CXC and were
successful,” Edghill-Stuart disclosed.
The Deputy Director’s department must help ensure socio-legal measures for rehabilitation, re-
education and reintegration are available to juvenile law breakers who come mainly from
vulnerable homes and communities and desperately need this second-chance envisaged in the
new law.
But in the end, it’s left to Magistrates, Edghill-Stuart noted.
“Determining where a juvenile is placed is solely up to the Magistrate. A juvenile who has
committed a summary offense, if the magistrate finds that s/he can be diverted, s/he will
not be placed in a closed residential facility,” Edghill-Stuart said.