Trinidad and Tobago’s national government has unveiled a multi-year recruitment plan to fill crippling staffing gaps in the country’s Prison Service, responding to urgent warnings from prison officer leadership that years of unaddressed attrition have pushed the institution to a breaking point.
Homeland Security Minister Roger Alexander confirmed last week that 800 new prison officers will be brought into the service between 2024 and 2027, in a bid to reverse the persistent staff exodus that has left the system short-staffed for more than a decade. The announcement comes after Prison Officers’ Association of Trinidad and Tobago (POATT) president Gerard Gordon raised public alarms about the growing crisis, noting that the service’s monthly departures have consistently outpaced new hires for years, with long-standing working condition issues driving officers to leave the profession.
Gordon shared detailed data with local outlet the Express outlining the scope of the attrition crisis. Since 2018 and 2019, he explained, the service has lost more than 100 officers annually. When Gordon took office as association president in 2023, total POATT membership stood at just over 2,900 officers; today, that number has dropped to roughly 2,500, meaning 400 officers have left the service in just three years. Even prior proposals to add 500 new officers would not have been enough to keep up with the rate of departure, Gordon added.
Beyond the staffing shortage, Gordon outlined a series of unaddressed problems facing frontline officers. One major long-standing issue is the difficulty for officers to obtain firearm user licenses, a debate that has been tied up in the court system for nearly a decade. Gordon clarified that the union is not calling for universal firearm issuance for all officers, but rather wants qualified officers who meet all regulatory requirements to be able to successfully obtain licenses. Currently, many applications are rejected on the grounds that officers do not face direct, documented threats to their lives or do not transport large cash sums — a standard that Gordon says ignores the inherent, well-documented dangers of correctional work and the post-traumatic risk officers face after losing colleagues to on-the-job violence.
Gordon also called out major deficiencies in the country’s prison infrastructure. He pointed to the Eastern Correctional Rehabilitation Centre, a facility first purchased by the government in 2011 for TT$235 million that has since undergone multiple rounds of additional construction work. More than a decade later, Gordon says the facility still does not meet global standards for correctional institutions. At the country’s Maximum Security Prison, long-running infrastructure failures persist, including crumbling structural systems, no backup power generator, broken security gates and inadequate lighting across the facility.
In his response to these concerns, Alexander confirmed the government has a clear timeline to roll out new recruits, framing the plan as the first serious effort to fix a decade of neglect under the previous administration. The first 500 recruits will begin orientation in July and August, with formal training set to launch in September this year. An additional 300 recruits will be hired in early 2025, bringing the total new hires to 800 to address the backlog of vacant positions.
“This Government has begun to fix the issues; we are fixing the attrition rate by recruiting 800 prison officers starting on the 27th of this month with 500 coming on board and another 300 in the new year,” Alexander told the Express. “I want to give the assurance that all the concerns of prisons officers past and present will be addressed. This is the first time in a long time they have a minister who cares and understands and a Prime Minister who has given instructions to clean up the mess left by the PNM.”
Alexander, who took office last year, said he inherited a broken national security system with strained human resources and a dysfunctional security apparatus. “With the lack of attention given to the Prison Service for the past ten years it is clear as day to me that the People’s National Movement (PNM) was never interested in dealing with crime,” he said.
The minister emphasized that the government recognizes the interconnected nature of a well-functioning Prison Service, the judicial system, and consistent public safety outcomes, noting that correctional services play a critical role in rehabilitating incarcerated people to reduce recidivism. Alexander added that the previous government left the correctional system starved of basic resources: “The institution responsible for rehabilitation of prisoners was left without manpower, resources, equipment, and a well-rounded structure to treat inmates. Instead, contracts were given out which resulted in incomplete arrangements for the alarm system, cameras and lighting.”
The correctional staffing push is part of a broader government effort to strengthen all national law enforcement agencies in Trinidad and Tobago. The Trinidad and Tobago Police Service is also set to recruit hundreds of new officers in the coming months, and 800 Special Reserve Police officers have already been fully absorbed into the regular Police Service over the past year. Alexander acknowledged that all long-standing problems will not be resolved overnight, but reaffirmed the government’s commitment to addressing every concern raised by POATT.