Dawn Ritch, Contributor
A RECENT editorial in this newspaper noted that the Government intended to build a great new prison. If that happens the Patterson administration will go down in history as the one that had the most crime and built the most prisons.
They took a world-famous production centre, Things Jamaican at Bumper Hall, but couldn't build on it or maintain it. The Patterson administration let Bumper Hall run down until they eventually turned it into a prison called The Horizon Remand Centre. But even then on the first night detainees broke out of the jail. There was some technical problem with the new prison. Locks released at will. So perhaps the Government doesn't really know how to build or maintain anything, not even prisons.
Had Things Jamaican remained open producing fine ceramics and craft items, mahogany furniture and antique reproductions, it would have continued to provide jobs and train people. This would have done more to reduce crime than this, or indeed any, new prison.
Instead of providing facilities to take advantage of our talent, the Patterson administration closes them and builds prisons. The courts pack up these prisons for minor offences, while major crime languishes in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, as though he has never heard that justice delayed is justice denied. And all this while a judge sends people to jail for stealing two mangoes. Is it only the poor who must go to jail in this country, but not white-collar criminals?
There has been some talk in government circles recently that the British might pay for a new jail in Jamaica. A significant percentage of the prison population in the United Kingdom is of Jamaican nationality, and hundreds of Jamaican women caught as drug mules are packing up their jails.
Is the Patterson administration now thinking of the construction of prisons in Jamaica as a kind of export industry? A new way for the country to earn foreign money?
BANKRUPT VISION
If so, then it is the most bankrupt vision ever conceived by any Government in a democratic country. The task of good governance is not to provide ever-increasing numbers of jail cells, but ever-increasing numbers of jobs.
The Patterson administration had a Cabinet Retreat last week in which jobs were suddenly the number one priority on their agenda. How can they after 14 years, suddenly realise that jobs are that necessary?
Meeting and talking about jobs for two days in the salubrious resort of Ocho Rios is not going to create them. No Government can create jobs without proper facilities for training and education. But this administration closes facilities that can train Jamaicans, and re-opens schools that have no water, toilets, desks or teachers. How can such strategies provide a disciplined cadre of skilled young people for the 21st century?
The Patterson administration has also had a long record of smashing up sector after sector with their foolish actions, so that companies collapse and jobs dry up. First there was the ruin of the Jamaican dairy and beef industry with imported milk powder and dumped meat parts. Farms closed down and jobs were lost. Then there was the garment sector killed by taxes, security and electricity costs until it became uneconomic and fled the country. At its peak it employed 40,000 people. Some taxi drivers can still remember having to wait 20 minutes in the morning and afternoon while garment workers crossed the road to the free port.
MORE JOBS LOSSES
Not content, the Patterson administration also inaugurated a high interest rate regime, the highest in the world, and kept it in place for over a decade. This led to the collapse of the manufacturing sector and indeed the implosion of the domestic financial sector as a whole. More jobs were again lost, but this time the losses cut deep into the heart of the heavily mortgaged middle class. Their homes went up for sale, and their pension savings were lost in a blizzard of failures.
Now the last vestiges of local manufacture in office uniforms and textbook printing are under attack. The Bank of Jamaica and Government agencies awarded their uniform contracts overseas. The Ministry of Education took the printing of primary school texts away from local suppliers and gave the job out overseas. I've heard no complaints about quality, only a kind of imperial disdain for late delivery.
Yet the foreign textbooks turn out to be late in the same way. Vegetable farmers are now complaining bitterly about dumped foreign produce. All pleas are falling on the deaf ears of an atrocious Government.
The irony is that the Patterson administration is again calling for yet another meeting with the private sector bodies. It seems that the one before the last Budget didn't result in any job creation. The Government probably only wants another meeting with the private sector so they can blame them for the abject lack of jobs in this country. I also wonder what can be the point of the Government meeting in Ocho Rios or anywhere else to discuss jobs, after it has already succeeded brilliantly in wiping away whole sectors and eliminating tens of thousands of jobs.
Instead the Most Honourable should simply vow to stop wasting billions of dollars in dubious contracts with mammoth overruns to party supporters, building prisons, and running unnecessary full-page ads for Highway 2000 which needs to advertise nothing. The money that is saved should be made available for the re-tooling of Jamaican industry and agriculture. Either that or they'll never be able to build enough prisons to incarcerate all the people who will have to steal their food and clothes.
