Tarkwa (W/R), March 2, GNA – The Perfectors of Sentiments (POS) Foundation, together with its funding Agency, the COVID-19 Grassroots Justice Fund under the COVID-19 Prisons Response Outreach Project, has donated assorted items to the Tarkwa prisons.
The items included medications, food items, alcohol-based hand sanitisers, face masks, veronica buckets, liquid soaps and tissue paper.
Presenting the items, the Executive Director of POS Foundation, Mr Jonathan Osei Owusu, commended Ghana Prisons Service for the pre-emptive measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which
contributed significantly towards safeguarding the prisoners and also ensuring their overall wellbeing.
“What would have been the situation if there was an outbreak in our prisons with this huge congestion without the said protocols, the cost to the State, riots and perhaps jailbreaks, insecurity and threat to national security and chaos, instability and loss of confidence in the system,” he explained.
According to Mr Owusu, “Prison officers undoubtedly play a pivotal role as frontline workers, therefore, we appeal to the government to provide incentives and contagious disease allowance for Prison Officers for their dedication to professionalism despite the health risk.
He implored the officers and men to safeguard the good record and continuously adhere strictly to the COVID-19 protocols as the virus was still a global threat.
Mr Owusu appealed to individuals, philanthropists, institutions and organizations to come to the aid of the Tarkwa prisons and their counterparts in the country to ease the challenges.
Chief Superintendent of Prisons, Mr Francis Doste, the Second in Command of the Tarkwa Prisons, thanked POS Foundation and its partner for the generosity.
He said congestion and inadequate funding to feed the inmates were some of the challenges confronting the Ghana Prisons Service.
“The Tarkwa Prison is supposed to keep 127 inmates but currently we have 296 inmates, including 55 remands as compared to the 150 inmates that we normally take,” Chief Superintendent Doste said.
He added that “ Each inmate is fed on GH￠1.80 for a day. We have made a lot of inputs to the government and up till now there had not been any positive results.”
GNA