On Christmas Day 2014, inhabitants of Trinidad & Tobago’s capital city, Port of Spain, had a unique opportunity to hear a live radio show broadcast from inside the country’s Maximum Security Prison, in an emotional simulcast.
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Rise Maximum Radio is a prison radio station which broadcasts into the cells at Golden Grove Maximum Security Prison in Arouca, close to Port of Spain.
Launched with support from the Prison Radio Association, Rise Maximum Radio aims to reduce reoffending in a country which faces enormous challenges. The murder rate is extremely high – in 2012, it ran at over 28 per 100,000 population (compared with just 1 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom), and the islands struggle to deal with problems related to drug importation.
In this clip, a promo for a show which was simulcast on Eye on Dependency on Talk City 91.1 on Christmas Day 2014, you can hear a flavour of the sorts of programmes which the team at Rise Maximum Radio produce to help the prisoners there look differently at their offending behaviour, try to make amends for what they have done, and look forward to living a crime-free life on release.