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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.

A high-stakes constitutional and national security legal battle has reached the Privy Council, where state attorneys have laid out three distinct legal arguments to reverse a Court of Appeal order that granted conditional release to wealthy businessman Dominic Hadeed and his wife Genevieve. The State is being represented by a high-powered legal team led by prominent King’s Counsel Sir James Eadie and Tom Richards, alongside senior local counsel Gerald Ramdeen, signaling the gravity of the legal and national security issues at play in the appeal.

The first core ground of the State’s challenge centers on a fundamental question of institutional authority: whether courts are legally entitled to override the executive branch’s national security assessments. State attorneys argue that the Court of Appeal explicitly recognized the long-standing legal principle that executive judgments on liberty restrictions for national security protection must be granted “very great weight” by judicial bodies. Even so, they contend the lower court failed to apply this principle in practice when it ruled the couple should be moved from prison detention to conditional house arrest.

The State’s legal team emphasizes that the executive branch holds unique institutional advantages for making these sensitive national security determinations. Unlike courts, the executive has full access to classified intelligence, specialized national security expertise, and sensitive information that cannot be disclosed in open judicial proceedings for operational security reasons. Beyond practical capability, attorneys argue that national security decision-making carries an explicit constitutional weight: responsibility for protecting the state is constitutionally assigned to democratically accountable government officials, rather than unelected judges.

According to the State’s argument, the Court of Appeal overstepped its constitutional mandate when it independently concluded that full imprisonment was unnecessary and house arrest would be sufficient to mitigate risks. Attorneys describe this move as an illegitimate overreach, noting that the Emergency Powers Regulations explicitly grant the responsible government minister the authority to decide whether preventive detention is necessary, as well as to determine the location and conditions of that detention. Courts, they argue, lack both the institutional capability and constitutional legitimacy to replace the minister’s assessment with their own judgment of how to manage the alleged threat.

The State also pushes back against claims that the absence of criminal charges against the Hadeeds invalidates the minister’s detention order. Attorneys stress that preventive detention under emergency regulations operates entirely separate from the standard criminal justice process. The minister is not required to prove the allegations against the detainee on the balance of probabilities, nor is they required to demonstrate a realistic prospect of a future criminal conviction before issuing a preventive detention order (PDO). The minister’s assessment, they note, is rooted in classified intelligence, which cannot be disclosed publicly or to the detainee because such disclosure would compromise intelligence sources, ongoing national security operations, and critical international intelligence-sharing partnerships.

A further procedural point raised by the State is that the Court of Appeal ordered the Hadeeds’ release before the State had even submitted its full evidence responding to the substantive judicial review challenge, which is not due until September 14, 2026. Attorneys argue that it was legally improper for the lower court to make binding findings on the validity of the intelligence underpinning the PDOs at this interim stage of proceedings. The State also confirmed that a separate statutory tribunal reviewing the lawfulness of the Hadeeds’ detention remains ongoing, and the minister has requested the hearing be reopened over allegations of procedural unfairness during earlier proceedings.

The State’s second ground of appeal argues that the Court of Appeal made a clear error when it ruled the Hadeeds’ individual liberty interests outweigh the state’s obligation to manage the alleged national security threat. Attorneys point out that even the Court of Appeal itself acknowledged the severity of the national security risks at hand: if the allegations against the couple are proven true, their release could allow them to continue advancing the alleged conspiracy they are accused of, leading to horrendous, irreparable harm to public safety and national institutions. Having accepted the existence of this severe risk, the State argues, the only reasonable balancing of interests could ever have favored protecting public life and democratic institutions over individual liberty.

The State also challenges the lower court’s weighing of the Hadeeds’ loss of liberty, noting that if the detention is ultimately found to be unlawful, the couple can be fully compensated with substantial financial damages. On the subject of the Hadeeds’ reported medical concerns that the Court of Appeal cited when supporting release, the State says the lower court failed to identify any specific medical condition that requires at-home treatment that cannot be adequately accommodated within a prison setting.

The third and final ground of the State’s challenge questions the adequacy of the conditional house arrest terms imposed by the Court of Appeal, arguing the measures are far less effective at mitigating risk than continued prison detention. State attorneys outline multiple flaws in the proposed regime: even with a ban on personal communication devices, the Hadeeds would still be able to engage in unauthorized communication from their private residence. While all visitors would require police approval, once inside the property, visitors would be able to communicate freely with the couple without ongoing monitoring.

Compounding these enforcement challenges is the physical layout of the Hadeeds’ proposed residence: a large sprawling seafront property made up of multiple separate buildings. State attorneys argue that effectively monitoring all activity across such a large site would create enormous practical challenges and draw heavily on limited police resources, making consistent enforcement of the house arrest conditions unfeasible. The State also warns that the layout creates a higher risk of the couple absconding, which would give them the opportunity to communicate completely unrestricted to advance their alleged activities. Ultimately, attorneys argue, there was no admissible evidence before the Court of Appeal that could support a finding that the proposed conditions were sufficient to mitigate the national security risks of release, and the lower court failed to acknowledge that switching from prison detention to house arrest would significantly reduce the level of public protection against the alleged threat.