Garth Rattray | Why are we dawdling on crime?

I came across examples of both ends of the crime continuum recently. The first was about a terrible father who was inculcating his seven-year-old son into dealing with disagreements by employing extreme violence, and the complicit, perhaps fearful mother who did nothing to discourage it.

The second was about imprisonment and the inhumane circumstances that do nothing to rehabilitate inmates. The prison conditions will harden most convicts. Those that are released back into a naïve society, a society that expects them to be somewhat rehabilitated, will eventually make that society pay the ultimate price for the failure of the system.

Studies have been done, and studies are always ongoing to elucidate and ‘treat’ criminality. Our local experts in anthropology, psychiatry and psychology have all weighed in on this serious ‘disease’ at one time or another. So, we know what to do, but we are dawdling. In the meantime, we focus most of our efforts on the end result of the disease of crime – the violence producers, apprehending them, incarcerating them so that we can punish them, and release most of them right back into the same environment that spawned them in the first place. And then we seem shocked and horrified when they re-offend.

We do comparatively little to shield our underprivileged children from all kinds of violence and abuse. They grow up bombarded by violence day and night. There is violence in the homes, in the tenement yards, in the communities, in the streets, in the ‘music’, and in the schools. These children constantly hear loud and aggressive quarrels, threats, the filthiest curse words imaginable, screams of pain/terror, and gunfire. They see violence and death up close, and become desensitised to them.

ABANDONED

Added to that is the unmistakable feeling of being abandoned by society. They are made to feel like living ghosts, nobodies, inconveniences to society. Nobody wants to get close to them, to show them love, to offer a gentle, consoling touch. They only seem to matter when they can vote, when they pay taxes, when they provide minimum-wage labour, or when they commit a crime. All of a sudden everyone knows their names, everyone knows how to describe them, and everyone wants to lay hands on them.

Many of them experience physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. The abuses that they must endure burrow deep within their troubled psyches and put down roots that last an entire lifetime. Some are hit by angry parents, beaten up by neighbours, invaded sexually by people who were able to get near to them because they were trusted by the family. Then there is the aggressive, angry, lewd, loud cacophony of ‘music’ emanating from similarly troubled individuals, who yearn to drown out the voices of their inner demons with noise.

When the innumerable lights on the hillsides shine brightly all night, while your area is plagued with unpredictable, brief, power surges and outages, and when you can’t afford the electricity bill, you start thinking about your place in society and how your well-being is valued by the powers that be. When you don’t enjoy the luxury of potable water (because of expense and/or supply), and you know that ‘uptown’ people can manage, even when the commodity becomes expensive, you realise that you are expendable.

When the garbage piles up higher where you are and less where ‘they’ are, you start feeling resentful towards the more fortunate citizens. When your roads are in a deplorable condition and it appears as if they will never be fixed, that resentful feeling grows. When your sewage system flows in the streets and it takes ‘forever’ to be addressed, you realise that such things would never be allowed to happen in ‘topanaris’ communities, and the resentful feeling takes on gigantic proportions.

FEEL DISRESPECTED

This builds up until you realise that you don’t know what it feels like to be loved by anyone. You feel constantly disrespected. All you remember is animosity and pain. And, under the right circumstances, you will take charge of your life and make someone, anyone else pay because, if pain is never relieved, it expresses itself in anger and hate.

We know that this is how many violent criminals are made. Some have the hard wiring to be sociopathic, but they require an environmental ‘trigger’ to manifest that capability. If they become monsters, it’s because we provided the trigger; our own society created them. They don’t need hard drugs to commit the unspeakable crimes that they commit, they are already infused with, and driven by, anger and hate. They act out how they feel inside – no pity for anyone, no love for anyone, and no remorse.

Our prisons are mainly ‘correctional centres’ for the rehabilitation of inmates…on paper. No one can be rehabilitated while sharing a six-by-eight-foot cell with two other inmates, and countless vermin. Having to use messy toilets by stooping or spreading a crocus bag so that you can sit will not rehabilitate anyone. And so, we must shuttle billions of tax dollars into security, justice and the ‘correctional services’. Additionally, the nation has many security companies and gated communities. Yet, we still live in fear because, deep inside, we know that we are very vulnerable to being targeted. We know what we must do, and we know how to do it, so let’s get it done!

Garth A. Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garthrattray@gmail.com.