Working as a prison officer is ‘a hell’ – Prisons Director-General calls for welfare interventions

The Director-General of the Ghana Prisons Service, Patience Baffoe-Bonnie, has made an appeal to Parliament for better pay for prison officers, saying the job is taking a heavy toll on their mental and physical health.

Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee, she said the pressure comes from the fact that officers who have committed no offence have to live in the same space as convicted prisoners.

“What it means is that every bad condition in that environment is directly linked to the prison officer who has not committed any offense. So the average prison officer is usually depressed,” she said.

She noted that working as a prison officer “is a hell,” with psychological, emotional and physical effects.

Ms Baffoe-Bonnie said the Service is also struggling to attract recruits, pointing out that in the last recruitment exercise, fewer people bought forms for the prisons than for the other security agencies.

“People are not ready to be prison officers because the environment is toxic, the salary is not too good,” she told the committee.

She said the country must begin to compensate for these conditions through salaries if it wants to attract the right people.

Contagious disease allowance

The Director-General also appealed for the payment of the contagious disease allowance to officers.

She said the issue has been on the table for a very long time, and at the moment, the allowance is paid only to staff at Ankaful, because that prison has been designated for prisoners with contagious diseases.

But she said officers there are not the ones at greatest risk.

“The danger rather is in the spaces where we are yet to know whether the prisoners have the contagious disease or not. They rather are not being paid that allowance,” she said.

She asked the committee to focus the allowance on officers working in those spaces, where the health status of prisoners has yet to be determined, and said the cost would be small.

She said that if this is done before other salary issues are looked at, it would be “a step in the right direction,” and would give her “the moral courage and justification” to enforce the laws as they stand.