Violent crimes constitute one of the greatest social problems facing Jamaica at this time. Two years ago, the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the West Indies (UWI), with the encouragement and support of Pro-Vice Chancellor Professor Kenneth Hall, principal of the Mona campus, UWI, spearheaded an initiative by the university to assemble its various scholars from across the faculties, to propose long-term strategies, which could effectively lead to a reduction in violent crimes and the overall levels of aggression in the country. This document represents a consultative approach to the problem and is intended to provide a more comprehensive and sustained response to this grave problem plaguing our nation. Part one was published yesterday.
These are some suggestion put forward by university academics and scholars.
6. Local media, especially television, must change the way it reports and presents crime stories.
Cheap sensationalism characterises much of what passes for TV news reporting on incidents of violent crime. Exploitative reportage of crime stories further dehumanises victims. It has the tendency to inflame without really informing. And, more dangerously, it provokes unwarranted fear in the citizenry at large. We call upon all local media to engage in more responsible journalism on the matter of crime.
7. Support localised efforts at peacekeeping, peacemaking and community justice.
Government does not have all the answers to crime, neither should it have the final say-so on what to do about crime. Grass-roots initiatives directed at fostering long-term peace between rival gangs and at restoring, through community and restorative justice, bonds sundered by crime should be endorsed, encouraged and facilitated.
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
Restorative justice seeks to redefine the roles and goals of criminal justice agencies to include a broader mission: to prevent crime, address local social problems and conflicts, and to involve neighbourhood residents in planning and decision-making. Both restorative and community justice are based on the premise that communities will be strengthened if local citizens participate in responding sensibly to crime; and both envision responses tailored to the preferences and needs of victims, communities and offenders.
The practice of restorative justice, aspects of which are already in place in areas around the country, holds that criminal justice systems should actively engage the parties touched by crime in repairing the injustices caused by crime. This means that individual offenders should indeed be held accountable for having hurt real people and real communities; and that they should be required to help make their victims (or the families of victims) whole again. Making restitution (or reparation) to crime victims is essential to individual rehabilitation, healing and reconciliation, and to restoring a community that had been sundered by a crime or crimes.
8. Increase efforts at rehabilitation within prisons.
While incarceration may demonstrate individual failure, prison can be environments in which change in patterns of conduct can occur. For this reason, any system of penal justice must provide those necessities that enable inmates to live in dignity. These include: food, clothing, shelter, personal safety, timely medical care, education, and meaningful work adequate to the conditions of human dignity.
Rehabilitation will not occur, however, under the island's present prison conditions. Currently, we have a rehabilitation-oriented commissioner and rehabilitation efforts have genuinely increased; yet, at the same time, there is a bloodbath going on inside the nation's maximum-security prisons. In this year alone there have been 20 murders and 35 stabbings, an increase of approximately 400 per cent for similar incidents reported last year. Beatings are the prime method for behaviour modification in our prisons.
OFFICIAL CORRUPTION
We believe that the root of the problem are high levels of official corruption; politicisation of labour disputes; deterioration of the physical plant; severe lack of security for all parties; and that rehabilitation, such as it is, occurs only on a preferential basis.
We urge that, in order to establish minimum conditions for the slightest possibility of rehabilitation, the authorities should immediately:
Seek the skills of knowledgeable teams of experts to solve the prisons' ongoing labour-relations problem, including the return of warders to the prison system.
Conduct a thoroughly independent external audit of the prisons' operations (the last internal audit was done three years ago, no one is sure the last time an independent, outside audit was done).
Move ahead with plans for building new detention centres and to replace ancient, dilapidated maximum-security buildings with new facilities though, importantly, we strongly urge against any movement toward massive prison construction a la the United States, not when we should be seriously developing alternative intermediate and community-based means for dealing with crime and criminality.
9. Generate targeted mass employment projects.
The association between unemployment and crime needs no elaboration here. However, we do want to call attention to findings showing that it is the most blighted areas in the Kingston metropolitan area and in places like Montego Bay that have the highest rates of homicides. These areas are responsible for a disproportionate share of the nation's violent crime problem. We see, therefore, a need for government and the private sector to immediately develop, inside targeted ghetto areas:
More programmes for comprehensive education, training and skills-building
Means for mass employment, primarily work projects that are not tied to
any sort of political patronage.
10. Invest in employment opportunities (including mass projects) that will in the long-term generate sustainable jobs.
While a significant percentage of the nation's youths is in need of immediate employment to, among other things, deter them from a life of crime, mere employment will not be enough. They will need good, viable jobs if they are to become stakeholders in the society.
11. Do more to enable
small-scale entrepreneurship.
Government and private financial institutions should do a lot more than they are currently doing to make it easier for enterprising youths to access capital in order for them to start, in this nation of entrepreneurs, their own mini-ventures and enterprises.
In addition, in order for many of the country's poor to be able to successfully access credit, they will need legal assistance in converting their informal assets into collateral. The lack of legal proof of ownership has meant that people cannot use houses (which many of them probably built on squatter land) as collateral for loans, sell stakes in their businesses, buy insurance to minimise risk or do other things that people in developed nations can do to turn a little money into a lot of money.
12. Establish on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies a peace institute.
The peace institute, as we envision it, would serve first and foremost to operationally define and put in practice essential elements of the type of transformative approach to issues of crime and social justice articulated in this document.
EDUCATION
The institute would be inter-faculty, cutting across academic and professional disciplines particularly social and applied sciences, medicine, social work, law, humanities, theology and education.
Its specific mission would be to:
Provide scholars, activists and other community leaders a common place to engage in research (including development of relevant methodologies), disseminate knowledge, and develop pedagogues around issues of community and communal peace
Ground and connect itself with indigenous organisations around the country, in the region and internationally, that are working 'on the ground' settling disputes and developing programs of community-centred rehabilitation, peacemaking and restorative justice
Observe, monitor and report, through mass information outlets, on national and regional achievements, or the movement towards goals of transformative justice
Facilitate and/or offer its resources (physical space, staff, funding, communications technology) to groups enjoined in combat, yet desiring peace
Sponsor public workshops, forums, colloquia and seminars on and dramatisations of topics relating to peace, justice, responsibility and civil society
Publish its own peacemaking journal, which would attract submissions from the region and the wider world
Encourage and promote the work of its scholars.
ULTIMATE SIGNIFICANCE
The ultimate significance we see in the Peace Institute, though, is that it will enable the University of the West Indies, specifically the Mona campus, another way to connect institutionally with the society-more directly so with its surrounding neighbourhoods. Signs are that, in the 21st century, the university will be obligated to fulfil new and more challenging roles. It is being challenged to develop new collaborative, community-based integrated-service systems and to define its role as a partner in community building. Jamaican and Caribbean society will need a new generation of inter-professionally-oriented university leaders who have the ability to convince the public and policy makers that knowledge and scholarship are as critical to the moral and social development of a nation as they are to scientific progress and economic growth. We must reinvent the university to respond to the needs of a society in transition.
