THE EDITOR, Sir:W. G. MICHAEL SENIOR in his letter to the editor of January 24, 2002 ("Prof missed the point") accuses me of not being fair in my article, "The narco-terrorist approach misses the mark" (Sunday Gleaner, January 20), to Minister Phillips' crime proposals. My arguments, Mr. Senior contends, were "unsound and naive".
He further writes that the Minister's "crime proposal is a comprehensive response to a pervasive threat to the nation". And that the Government's planned war on narco-terrorism "is just one segment" of a "plan" that "details an approach to a macrocosm".
Well, I went back and re-examined a sample of the scores of newspaper stories that carried in its next-day editions the Minister's proposals. And, for the life of me, sir, I'm unable to find one item in their presentation of what the Minister said that would lead me to conclude that the proposals are anything more than a plan, as you call it, to beef up measures to fight international drug trafficking.
Do take a look, if you will, sir, at The Gleaner's "Gov't outlines plans to fight crime," on page A2 of January 17, and see if you see anything in the story that suggests differently - apart from the piecemeal bit, stuck to the very end, about launching of a "Peace Management Initiative".
Nowhere in the Minister's plan does he speak to any of the underlying conditions mentioned repeatedly in Government-funded task force and commission reports too numerous to mention - that have got us to the sorry point we now are. Minister Phillips himself wrote, not so long ago, before he was a prominent Government Minister: "The celebration of the violent hero, is only one aspect of the insidious intrusion of violence into our culture. Language, behaviours, music and other aspects of our life, and self-presentation, have become increasingly conditioned by this violence. You see it at the bus stop. You hear it in the dance hall. You confront it waiting in line at public places."
He goes on: "What is more, this increasing pervasive propensity to be violent exacerbates the condition of general institutional breakdown which has been one of the consequences of the very intense economic crisis which has beset the country over the past decade" (i.e., the 1980s).
Then Dr. Phillips had a sound, in-depth, critical grasp of the complexity of the nation's crime problem. The features he correctly postulated then haven't changed much; they may even have worsened.
How will IONSCAN equipment, armoured vehicles and infringement on the rights and freedoms of the law-abiding citizens of this land improve that situation? Has the Government not considered, what if the metropolitan countries into which our trans-shipped narcotics go decide one morning to legalise (not merely decriminalise) all "dangerous" drugs, notably cocaine and heroin, as several leading U.S. opinion makers, academics and mayor of a large city (Baltimore) have prescribed as the ultimate solution to their drug problem?
That would take the crime, and hence much of the profitability, out of the international trade in narcotics, thereby reducing, if not altogether eliminating, its rich earning power for many in poor, little Jamaica. Worse, it would leave up one very deep creek the thousands of young Jamaicans who, as Dr. Phillips had so eloquently seen, before he became a top politician, as the persistent casualties of the nation's preposterously imbalanced social and economic arrangements.
I am etc.,
BERNARD HEADLEY
Professor of Sociology & Criminology
University of the West Indies, Mona.
