By Mark DaCosta- According to a statement issued by the A Partnership for National Unity / People’s National Congress Reform (APNU/PNCR) coalition, the state is failing children held at the Plum Park Juvenile Detention facility in Sophia, Georgetown, and public monies earmarked for their care may have been diverted for political purposes.
The coalition contends that deteriorating infrastructure, substandard meals and alleged financial irregularities at the facility amount to a betrayal of Guyana’s most vulnerable young people, and it has demanded a full, independent accounting of how taxpayers’ funds allocated to Plum Park have been spent.
The APNU/PNCR says it has received troubling reports about the physical state of the Plum Park facility, where children and young people who come into conflict with the law are held while awaiting trial or serving sentences. The coalition argues that the building’s deficiencies, together with questions surrounding the quality and nutritional value of the food served to those in custody, fall far short of what any decent society should accept.
Plum Park has long occupied an important place in Guyana’s child welfare architecture; Parliament approved millions of dollars in 2019 alone for the completion of the Children and Family Centre there, and the facility has for years provided temporary shelter and services for vulnerable children and families in Sophia. Against that history of investment, the coalition maintains that the conditions now being described represent a serious regression.
What has sharpened the coalition’s anger, however, are allegations that monies budgeted for the detention centre may instead have financed ministerial outreach activities. The coalition describes such a possibility, if proven, as nothing less than a grave abuse of public resources, insisting that the welfare and dignity of children in state custody must come before politics.
The coalition notes that every dollar directed to Plum Park was authorised by Parliament for a defined purpose, and that diverting those funds would strike at the very integrity of our nation’s budgetary process. The coalition is careful to frame the allegation as unproven, but argues that the seriousness of the claim demands an immediate and transparent response.
To that end, the APNU/PNCR has laid out a clear set of demands. It wants an independent audit of all funds allocated to Plum Park, full disclosure of how those resources were actually expended, and a proper investigation into any suspected diversion or misuse. Beyond the financial questions, the coalition is calling for the physical shortcomings of the facility to be corrected without delay, and for the nutritional standards governing meals for the juveniles to be reviewed. Underpinning these demands is a simple principle: children in state care are entitled to safe accommodation, proper nutrition, humane treatment and meaningful rehabilitation.
The coalition has placed responsibility for answering these questions squarely on the Minister of Human Services and Social Security, arguing that she owes the Guyanese people a complete account of the resources channelled to Plum Park and how they have been utilised. International standards are unambiguous on this point; juvenile detention facilities must safeguard the rights of children deprived of their liberty, and conditions that are unhygienic or lacking in basic necessities have been condemned across the hemisphere.
For the coalition, the matter is not a partisan one but a test of our country’s conscience, since the young people inside Plum Park, whatever their circumstances, remain children of our nation entitled to protection, dignity and a genuine prospect of rehabilitation. The APNU/PNCR says it will press until those answers are delivered, warning that public funds must be used for the purposes for which Parliament allocated them, and that the truth about Plum Park can no longer be deferred.
