Prison unit damaged in six-hour stand-off
Monday 26th September 2011, 2:30PM BST.
AN INMATE caused £2,000-worth of damage during a six-hour stand-off with prison officers at Les Nicolles.
Ceiling tiles, lights, and piping were smashed and an area flooded during the incident.
Joe de Garis, 25, admitted the offence at a Magistrate’s Court hearing at which he appeared via video link from the category A Long Lartin Prison, near Birmingham.
Judge Russell Finch said the sentence would have to be consecutive as significant damage had been caused to the prison.
He sentenced de Garis to a further six months in prison.
- Earlier this year, de Garis was sentenced to seven years in prison for two assaults and inflicting grievous bodily harm on a fellow prisoner at Les Nicolles.
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Why should England have to deal with our cast offs? I hope they are sending Guernsey the bill.
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SS
Yes they do send us the bill, and a handsome one at that!
Guernsey can’t possibly accommodate all categories of prisoners, there are many people serving long sentences in the UK (i.e. murderers) and others go for specific rehabilitation courses (i.e. rapists). The cost to Guernsey is very high, but not as much as catering for those categories of offenders over here.
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A six hour stand off!
I can remember some of the old guard who would have had that minor incident sorted in six minutes
De Garis wouldn’t have got much joy if he had told one of them to bring him a hot drink and a Press
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This is ridiculous, why was he able to make this amount of damage? It’s because it’s like the bloody Ritz hotel in there!
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Re-introduce the birch. It is cheaper and nobody wants to experience it twice. Take a leaf from the Singapore book – the lowest crime rate in the world. They are always ready with the cane (as it is called there) and it makes it safe to leave your purse in your shopping trolley without standing guard over it. And you can go out at night with no fear of being bashed. Ive been there twice and some friends of mine lived and worked there for years and say it is unbelievable.
Bry
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Brian Harper
Congratulations on being the first plank to come up with the “bring back the birch” argument.
If you think Singapore is so great, with corporal and capital punishment along with various controls of freedom of the press/expression etc, the answers simple; clear off there.
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Mr G
I can only assume you have never been in either of the Ritz Hotel or the Guernsey Prison.
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He has no regard for the law or anybody in society and needs to be kept behind bars or sent back to Leeds where he manifested from, they can have him back! Original offence was for whacking someone when they are asleep, that’s brave of him and clearly he has no morals at all, and can’t do it in a fair fight! Lets hope he keeps getting into trouble and that way it will be one less idiot on the island and out of society!
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Put him in with Charlie Bronson, that’ll sort him out.
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This incident was allowed to escalate
Officers in riot gear were ready to intervene within 30 minutes of this distubance but were prevented from doing so for reasons unknown .
This then allowed the prisoner to flood the area and damage the unit so badly that it was unusable for a long time.
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Phil
I don’t agree at all with some of Singapore’s lack of freedom but on corporal punishment alone its hard to argue against them. Their crime statistics are extremely low and its one of the safest places in the world.
I remember about 15 years ago when the teenage son of a US diplomat based there was sentenced to the birch for mindless vandalism. The US was up in arms. “How dare they treat a US citizen abroad like that?”. The Singapore Premier went on national TV in the US to remind viewers that the kid committed the offence in Singapore, not in the US, and that as a result Singapore law applied. He then compared Singapore’s crime statistics with the US’s crime statistics and very clearly demonstrated that Singapore’s system worked far better. The retention of corporal punishment and the willingness to actually use it was a huge deterrent. It works there.
It would be very intetesting to know what percentage of Guernsey’s teenagers who were birched actually reoffended. I suspect very few.
The abolition of corporal punishment and the outlawing of the old-fashioned “clip round the ear” seems to have coincided with the growth of unruly behaviour. I see both sides of the argument on corporal punishment but its hard to argue that it wasn’t effective.
Human rights sometimes goes too far. Do you remember the old “black list” whereby regular offenders of alcohol related offences were unable to buy or consume alcohol from licensed premises? How many people who have since been jailed for alcohol-induced violent offences would have benefited from the black list in recent years?
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Martin
The whole corporal (and indeed capital) punishment argument just isn’t worth having, neither will be reintroduced here so let’s just forget it shall we. We may as well be saying “bring back hanging” or “bring back the rack”, it ain’t going to happen! If a country can only reduce crime by threat of caning or birching their citizens, it doesn’t say much for them in my opinion.
As for the Yanks complaining about the treatment of their citizens, that’s just typical. They don’t seem to have a problem in executing people from countries who have no death penalty though.
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Phil
Never say never…if the other methods of policing don’t have any effect, then its not impossible to see that corporal punishment may well return (along with National Service, perhaps!). Admittedly things would have to get even worse from now for that to happen, but like anything there will eventually be a tipping point. Zero tolerance can only work if the penalty is effective. ASBOs, binding-over orders and suspended sentence don’t appear to be working in the UK, and we can’t avoid the fact that Guernsey is correlated to the UK in many such areas.
There are two extreme ends of the scale and whilst most of us would never want to see a return to the hard-line extreme, I suspect the vast majority would accept that the softly-softly approach, based around human rights, with teachers, the police and parents having had all effective powers removed from them, has led to the breakdown in acceptable standards of behaviour that is so prevelant today. A balance somewhere nearer to the middle of the spectrum is surely where we have to get to. How that’s achieved though is a very thorny issue. The recent London riots could well be the catalyst for such change.
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Burhou Tower would make a great Alcatraz….!!
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Martin
Are you a gambling man? I’m happy to have a large bet that Guernsey will not reintroduce corporal punishment in the next 20 years. I’d be happy to state longer than that but I might not be alive to collect my winnings!
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I remember speaking to JDG’s co-accused about 7 years ago, they’d both been convicted of a serious assault on a Latvian girl, breaking her arm in the process. This very disturbed individual told me they would have also raped her if they hadn’t been interrupted, oh what a charming couple of idiots they were.
JDG considered himself a hard man back then, but he would only ever pick on those weaker than himself. A couple of times I saw him try it on with other prisoners who told him in no uncertain terms that they wouldn’t be putting up with his antics, the result was that he sloped off with his tail between his legs, then proceeded to write derogatory graffiti about the individuals concerned.
He’s about as hard as a soft poached egg, just an attention seeking bully with little between his ears.
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Phil
If Martin won’t take your bet and you’ve still got the itch I’m willing to bet you a thousand pounds that the world will not end on 21/12/2012
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brian harper
i too have been to Singapore twice , lovely place, you should know then that they have a very large prison there and i mean large which they are very proud of. If they have hardly any crime why such a large prison?
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Simple. Send him to Prison,that should sort him ! He won’t like that !
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Phil,
What is your solution then?
Interested to know your answer since you know what won’t work.
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I feel sorry for the inmate i bet he will not get flat screen tv or playstations or fish on fridays or roasts on sundays or chinese on saturdays and the list goes on if i had no family or job thats the place i woulds want to be it is like the ritz
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Caroline
Rehabilitation of offenders might be a start, rather than just locking them up for most of the day allowing them to sleep away their sentences. The move towards Les Nicolles becoming a working prison, where inmates are required to actually get up in the morning and do a day’s work, is certainly a good thing.
Of course there will always be those who cannot be bothered to work (it’s also the case in the general population as well as the prison one) and I would ensure that those characters got the absolute bare minimum in terms of food, entitlement to sport, association etc, whereas those who performed well at work would be rewarded in those areas.
It’s sad but true that there are several people in Guernsey for whom it is likely that nothing will work, they will be in and out of prison all their lives. That isn’t true for the vast majority though, who need help and guidance in showing them that there is a better path to go down, keeping them locked up doing nothing most of the day is hardly going to help them once they get out, whereas some vocational and lifestyle training may just see them get a job and settle down as a “normal” member of society upon their release.
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Ex inmate. You are so right. Been there done that. JDG is nothing but a demanding drain on GY . Guernsey prison was run as a prison in my time but now with all the pink liberals the criminals demand and of course the criminals get.The word they have forgotten is NO. Have a backbone and surely 99 per cent of crims will understand. How much in legal aid is this lad costing us?
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OK so he caused damage and a lot of Mayhem.
Surely the answer must be, that he must pay form all the damage;
What’s that? he’s in Prison: and he should stay there and work until all the damage he has done is paid for.
Then he should have a new trial and be judged for all the damage he has done.
But as many as you say, the prison is just a soft resting place.
It’s time the prison meant just that,
A curtail of all normal ways of life.
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