Crime and punishment

I HAVE a young friend who is a strong supporter of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and who railed at me once that the People's National Party (PNP) had been 'soft on crime', and this was partly the reason why our country was now crime-ridden. What is interesting is that my PNP friends echoed the same statements when accusing the JLP of being at the root of the crime problem.

I tend to frustrate them both by positing that both parties had each been blind where crime was concerned! I said this because they all equated being tough on crime with the building of more and better prisons, handing out more jail time, modernising and equipping the police force with better and more high-powered weapons, and with modern facilities, and the reintroduction of the death penalty.

No one denies that there is a need to put a lid on crime. But, first, we must decide on what we define as crime and free up our law courts, our police force and our prison system from the burden of having to treat with 'offences' that many of us have to be socialised into accepting them as being wrong in the first place.

Stop and think

We need to stop and think about this thing we call 'the crime problem'. We must revisit the question, 'Who is a criminal?' or better yet, 'What is a crime?' and stop following the Americans blindly and condemning many of our youth as criminals when they are indeed potentially productive, decent young men. If the definition of a crime is 'something which is against the law' we must remember that some of our laws were enacted when we were ruled by a colonial power and are inimical to our self-acceptance as a people, and that some rub against the grain of the social customs of at least a significant minority of our people.

We seem to pattern so many of our decisions on what is done in the United States (US). In the 1970s, the US began its war on drugs and started locking up people for using drugs. By 2010, the prison population had risen by 700 per cent and this has not solved the problem. What it has done is that it has made criminals of literally millions of young people. The prison population in that country is now over 2.3 million people (that is just slightly more than the entire population of Jamaica). There are more people locked up in America than in any other country in the world - even places like China, which has an autocratic, draconian system and a population many times greater than theirs. And we have followed the US! We have made possession of ganja a criminal offence in Jamaica, where in many a household Granny has a jar with ganja steeped in white rum for use for medical purposes.

Class profiling

There have been thousands of youth in Jamaica who have been arrested and locked up for possession of a ganja spliff. Others have been arrested for loitering. This was interpreted as "standing around in a public place with the apparent intention of committing a crime". There is no law that lends itself to racial and class profiling as much as this. I suspect that necromancy is also still against the law. Police can also be called into action if your neighbour has a person of his/her same sex in their bedroom. And now we have lawmakers trying to make it an offence if one wears one's trousers too low on one's hip! We need to be serious and curb our desire to control the behavior of others.

And, finally, we must accept that jail time is punishment. It does not cure, does not rehabilitate. A few prisoners are rehabilitated, but they are in the minority. Many young men are beaten, sodomised and made bitter while in jail. Those survive do so because they link up with jailhouse 'dons' and become part of a jailhouse gang, or because they establish themselves as cold-hearted 'wicked' youth who would kill an abuser. So when a young man is arrested, if the crime is serious and we want to punish the perpetrator, let us do so with the clear knowledge that he may quite likely return to society worse than he went in.

Keith Noel is an educator. Send comments to columns@gleanerjm.com