Long before Andria Whyte Walters became a practising attorney she was passionate about prison reform, but the jarring experience of having an inmate call her threatening that even though he was behind bars he could “get to” her has set the experienced advocate on the warpath to see Jamaica’s correctional facilities serve their intended purpose.

“The person did that because he was being unruly in court and I reprimanded him in open court. This is somebody that is literally not in a police lock-up but in a prison, and he used his phone from inside the prison to call me, and he wasn’t shy about it,” Whyte Walters said in a recent interview with the Jamaica Observer, adding that she was shaken by the experience.

“The prisons are so old, they’re not suited to curtailing prisoners ‘reaching out’. We have to decide the kind of correctional institutions we want. Do we want one that is just reactive and just like an assembly line, so they come in, some come out, and then another set comes in, or is it that we are saying, listen, we need to get a fit-for-purpose correctional institution?” Whyte Walters argued.