Government Proposes New Parole System Focused On Rehabilitation
A new parole system aimed at rehabilitating prisoners and reducing repeat offending is being proposed under the Parole Bill, 2026.
The Parole Bill, 2026, seeks to introduce a parole system to permit the early release of prisoners during their period of incarceration, while promoting their rehabilitation and reintegration into society under structured supervision.
Speaking in the Senate, Minister of Justice Devesh Maharaj said the legislation marks a significant shift toward a more rehabilitative approach to justice, one that goes beyond punishment to better prepare inmates for reintegration into society.
He noted that statistics indicate that persons released from prison are likely to relapse into a life of crime.
« So more than half of our young persons in Trinidad and Tobago enter the prison service recycling, and they are coming out, doing more crimes, heading back in. »
Through the Parole Bill 2026, the government is seeking to rehabilitate prisoners to ensure they are fit to reintegrate into society.
« The structured rehabilitative framework provided within this Bill assures the public that persons released from incarceration are less likely to be further entrenched in criminality during their sentence and are more likely to reintegrate as law-abiding and productive members of society after having gone through some sort of rehabilitative exercise. »
The Minister explained that while some rehabilitation initiatives already exist within the prison service, many are supported mainly by faith-based and non-governmental organisations, with no dedicated State funding for research and programme development.
« There are programmes such as educational and adult literacy programmes. There are technical and vocational programmes, spiritual, cultural, social, and sporting programmes. But this is where it becomes a little concerning. Most of the programmes, and this is the prison, most of the programmes are rolled out with support primarily from various faith-based organisations, community-based organisations, non-governmental organisations. So the State by itself is not managing this process. »
Minister in the Ministry of Housing, Phillip Alexander, described the Bill as timely and long overdue.
« This is not about releasing prisoners. This is managing offenders through transformation of lives by creating a system of supervised personal responsibility. That one thing is critical to the redevelopment of a strata of society with nowhere to go. This gives persons whose lives have run off the rails a way back to full contributing members of society. »
