Locked In, Fed Up: Prison Officers Stage Walkout

It was anything but business as usual at the Belize Central Prison on Wednesday, as eleven prison officers walked off the job. Their reason? Poor working conditions. These wardens, employed by the Kolbe Foundation, say they’ve had enough—raising concerns about everything from shared sleeping spaces to the lack of personal lockers. Now, they’re part of a two hundred-strong workforce, living in newly renovated barracks, but they say the upgrades don’t go far enough. Some even refused to sleep on top bunks. Their demands might sound simple, but prison CEO Virgilio Murillo isn’t convinced, they’re “unreasonable,” he told News Five in a phone interview earlier today. So, what’s really going on behind the prison walls?

 

On the Phone: Virgilio Murillo, CEO, Kolbe Foundation

“We just upgraded the officers’ barracks because we camp our prison officers who work shifts. They work a seven days on/seven days off shift and we normally camp them, we feed them, and everything. And it so happened that we recently renovated the barracks. There’s a capacity of roughly forty bunk beds and eighty-three lockers. It so happens that because we have over two hundred prison guards, each one of them apparently wants to have their own lockers and that is highly impractical. Whether they are at the prison or not, they just want a locker assigned to them and remain locked with whatever personal items they may have in their while they are on their shift off, which is seven days. It’s just not practical. Similarly, they did not want to sleep on the top bunks. They all want an individual bed because they all want to be on the ground. So I think those were very unreasonable requests. Obviously, they were not happy about that and they got disgruntled. They walked off the job because they felt that their request was not being given. The sad thing is that the majority of them, over eighty percent of them were recently hired, so their tenure of service is very minimal. My senior staff, they are very pleased. They are pretty much on the job right now, getting the job done.”

 

Isani Cayetano

“Just for the record, them walking off yesterday simply means that they have essentially terminated their services with the Kolbe Foundation.”

 

Virgilio Murillo

“That would be my interpretation of it, that’s being defiant. They refuse to understand that we’re just not able to provide each and every prison officer with a locker. For me, it’s just so hard in an environment like this and I always tell people, to work in a prison you have to be cut out of a different material and not everybody can make it in this area because it’s a tough place to work.”