Public Safety and Justice Centre launched
published: Monday | January 24, 2005

By Petrina Francis, Education Reporter

AS JAMAICA grapples with a high level of violent crimes, a Centre for Studies in Public Safety and Justice was launched last Thursday at the University of the West Indies (UWI), "to conduct ongoing research on crime, security and peace issues affecting the Caribbean and small states."

According to Dr. Anthony Harriott, senior lecturer in the Department of Government at the university, "The purpose of the centre is to better organise and co-ordinate our efforts (and) to amplify and extend what is being done."

"The centre, it is hoped, will facilitate the housing of a critical mass of researchers that will allow new types of activities and projects," Dr. Harriott said during a ceremony held at the UWI. He noted that the centre would not be involved systematic work, but will simply build on what is already being done.

He added that the centre was expected to be a place within the university that houses a body of specialists who are dedicated to the study of the specific issue of security in the region and small states.

Dr. Harriott, a noted criminologist who has written extensively on the issue of crime in Jamaica, explained that the Centre for Studies in Public Safety and Justice was so named because "we wish to emphasise the link between Pubic Safety and Justice", as the two are interrelated.

He said the experience of Jamaica since Independence suggested that the pursuit of crime control without regard for justice was futile. "It makes our crime control efforts ineffective as it fractures the society, and leads to repeated protests for justice that are directed at the institutions involved in crime control and alienates these institutions from the publics that they ought to serve and on which they are dependent in so many ways," the UWI academic added.

In his remarks at the launch Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said Jamaicans needed "a society that has not only low rates of crime, but high rates of safety where people are not afraid (and) where people feel safe..."