Bernard Headley, ContributorSOMETIME LAST year, in the summer of 2003, a small, unofficial multi-racial delegation from Great Britain visited the island. The group comprised, as I recall, two British civil servants, one retired, the other an officer in the British correctional system; a graduate student in criminology, who also was a social worker in two separate British correctional institutions; and three expatriate Jamaicans who'd been living in Britain for some time. One was a minister of religion with a large and distinctly Jamaican congregation in a large metropolitan centre. Another had been a schoolteacher when she lived in Jamaica, in the early 1960s; she was involved, at the time the group visited, in a civic organisation dedicated to the cause of rescuing Jamaican youngsters from Britain's mean streets, and others whose lives were in stages of distress.
GRIM NEWS
As I understood it, the group's mission was not of an explicit Government-to-Government nature. They had, nonetheless, met with representatives of the Ministries of National Security and Justice. They wanted equally, though, to meet with, speak to and hear from representatives of Jamaican civil society. The group did not get a large turnout at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. Working against them might have been problems of logistics, timing and failure of advance notification. Still, I rather doubt that their bona fides, resumes or the nature of their mission would have excited a large UWI gathering.
They were not, after all, luminaries of Caribbean thought. Neither was any among them some brilliant legal mind able to bedazzle with long treatises on the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). The British visitors were simply not the kind of folk who could have, on any given evening, packed the University Undercroft.
Nevertheless, the Faculty of the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work was able to hastily assemble, in a small un-air-conditioned room, a couple of lecturers and graduate students to exchange and to hear what it is the visitors had to say. And the information they shared with us was as potentially useful as it was stark, grim, dire.
The delegation informed us that British society, and a liberal British Government, had had a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus turnaround, an epiphany and change of heart on the matter of crime. Political and civic leaders had come to terms (simultaneously with their American counterparts) with the expensive blunder of indiscriminate mandatory prison sentencing. And that the British public had grown wary of disproportionate amounts of their hard-earned sterling being spent on the costly and wasteful venture of building more and more prisons as the answer to crime.
The unforeseen, and certainly unintended, consequence of not expanding available prison space, the delegation informed us, has been a terrible, unsustainable situation of prison overcrowding. A situation having resulted from the correctional system having to accommodate offenders already serving mandatory minimums, at the same time that new, violent "recruits" are coming in.
SUFFICIENTLY PUNISHED
The solution to overcrowding that's been garnering momentum among the British public (largely because of its proven successes there and elsewhere) has been early release: programmes built around careful, well-laid-out strategies for reintegrating back into viable communities select numbers of inmates, those who have been sufficiently punished and who demonstrate clear and convincing promise of reform. That's an experiment of sorts, however (and not at all cheap), that the British public has felt obliged to "gamble on" only for those for whom it feels compelled to; that is, its own British convicts, despised and troublesome though they might have been.
MORE DIRECT WAY
But the argument has been raging in influential British circles, our guests warned us, in favour of an even more direct, certain and quicker way to deal with the prison-overcrowding crisis in the country. It's to move more aggressively at getting rid of, putting totally out of the correctional system and out of the country, a class of criminals who not only don't look British, but to whom the Brits feel no obligation, to whom they owe absolutely nothing.
The prison population, that is, which is comprised of foreign nationals, but who are doing time at 'our' expense, in 'our' overburdened prisons. Let the countries from which they hail, the cultures and societies that produced them, and then "unleashed" them on us (the way it correctly is, and not the other way around, Prime Minister Patterson), take them back!
Maybe those countries, with communities that understand and best know these foreigners, how they behave and 'operate', can rehabilitate and make some good of them. That broad class of criminal 'excludables', the delegation informed us, included, in all of Britain, more than 2,000 Jamaicans. Jamaican officials and the Jamaican society, they advised, had better, then, 'get ready' to receive stepped-up numbers of criminal deportees coming from Britain beginning 'sometime next year', meaning 2004.
SHOCK AND DISMAY
So why, after this kind of dire warning, the furious official hand-wringing, the expressions of surprise, the 'shock and dismay', as put by the Ministry of National Security's Gilbert Scott, the Government man caught in the headlights on this issue? The information that the British delegation shared with us a year ago was equivalent to the kind of information the Hurricane Unit, the Meteorological Office or the Office of Disaster Preparedness might have presented: information you use to plan, prepare and mobilise.
Our British visitors wanted to know how they might assist both the Jamaican Government and civil society, represented through their non-governmental organisations (NGOs), in dealing with the pending "onslaught." How were we going to meet the needs of the arriving deportees? They explored with us what would be the best strategy for assisting the deportees toward the goals of resettlement and (perhaps for the first time in their lives) integration into the Jamaican society as these, surely, would have to be the focused objectives. Would good-minded citizens like themselves giving small amounts of cash to the deportees on leaving Britain, to help them start in Jamaica their own mini, legal enterprises, facilitate the process?
The citizens of Jamaica, I'd think, need to know: Did the Ministries of National Security and Justice engage beforehand in this level of discussion, with either representatives of civil society in Britain or with the British Government? Did we ask, negotiate or beg in the same way we've been successful at getting the British Government to send us guns and ammunition, and Scotland Yard to come and investigate allegations of police misconduct that, in sending us back our criminal own, they also assist in providing programs of rehabilitation, similar to the ones of proven success in Britain? The answers could be hugely instructive.
Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology at the University of the West Indies. He is currently directing a sponsored preliminary study of Jamaican deportees from the United States.
