In one of our lead stories today “Football coach sentenced for sex crime – judge says intervention programme needed” it made me wonder how it is we have money for government official parties, conferences, sports, arts, endless reports, etc. but when it comes to anything connected with prisons, whether it is incarceration security or prisoner /prison prevention programmes, we don’t have the funds. It is a similar problem with mental illness that also concludes in incarceration, as there is nowhere else.

With Cubans escaping ad nauseam at Fairbanks Immigration Detention Centre because of inadequate security and similar concerns at Northward Prison itself, Justice Quin, after he jailed the football coach for having sex with an underage teen said, it was “extremely regrettable an intervention programme for sex offenders does not exist”.

During the case it was discovered that the football coach had himself been abused as a child by a friend of his mother who, now deceased, was a drug addict. His father is serving a long prison sentence at Northward.

The judge told me  it was urgent that dedicated programmes to stop sex offenders re-offending were put in place at Northward.

We have also heard the urgent need for a programme dealing with mental illness in children that is seen in the schools. Many teachers have voiced their concerns but even if the ears the authorities have are not deaf there is clearly hearing difficulties down the chain of command.

There are few inpatient facilities for adults and none whatsoever for children!

We have politicians shouting prevention before cure and they are “looking into” into ‘it’ but the problem is still there and unlike Lewis Carroll ‘s Alice, they don’t go through the looking glass to find it’.

When we see government spending thousands on annual parties to hand out awards to civil servants, who quite frankly are doing the job they are paid for, I shake my head in wonderment.

Dr Lockhart put the whole thing in perspective when he said recently, “We complain about just having an eight-bed unit for adults, but there is no unit for children.”

The Cayman Islands Health Services Authority treated 366 children between the ages of 4 and 17 for a mental illness in 2012, although the true figures, said Dr. Lockhart, are more like 600 when taking into account children seeking medical treatment in the private sector!

And what has happened to the mentally ill woman that allegedly smashed up two George Town eateries with a machete because she wanted to something to eat? She was charged and sent to Fairbanks prison where she ended up in hospital because another female poured boiling hot water over her because she was making too much noise.

And what will happen to the football coach in Northward? What treatment will he get? I shudder to think.

We know the problem. We know the answer but we don’t seem to see the priorities of the few funds we do have.

Words are cheap. Parties and consultants reports are not. They have the priority though.

Judges, warders, police, teachers, probation officers, etc. have to deal with the problem that costs us ten times the amount of an intervention programme. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But it seems to make sense to government.

Alice’s adventures in Wonderland make more sense, and that is fact.