Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams (second left) walks with Corporal Leighton Bucknor (centre) and other policemen freed in the Braeton trial on February 11, 2005. - Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer

Despite constant and harsh criticism of Jamaica's criminal justice system by human rights lobby groups and Jamaicans at large, a pair of Harvard University researchers is commending the Government for acting firmly in the face of the monstrous crime wave.

Jamaica is said to be among the top three countries in terms of the incidence of murder, with an average of 51 murders per 100,000 population last year. Jamaica also has one of the highest rates of police killings in the world with 168 killings by the police in 2005 and a further 207 people last year.

Researchers Todd Frogglesong and Christopher Stone of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, produced a working paper focused on measuring the criminal justice systems of both Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. They found that while there was still plenty of improvement to be made, the governments were to be commended for their move to employ technology and modern methods of policing to collect and analyse data that would help them to better understand whether the criminal justice system was helping to reduce crime in their countries.

More social services needed

Lookingat a number of policing approaches used by the two countries, the researchers recommended that the governments move to incorporate more social services into the criminal justice system in order to lessen criminality in their societies.

"Innovations in governance should widen the circle of functions within the criminal justice system," Froggelsong and Stone suggested.

"Victim services, indigent defence, addiction treatment and other public health services might all be brought together in the service of reducing crime and violence," they continued.

They also outlined specific weaknesses in the strategies being used by the police to strengthen the criminal justice system. The clear-up rate, once measured, the researchers noted, was not monitored to reveal whether arrests would yield convictions upon trial in court.

"These same data on clearance rates would provide better measures still if they helped the police measure the equity in their policing and the strengthening of their adherence to certain human rights standards," Frogglesong and Stone argued.

Recommendations

They recommended that Jamaican police statisticians for example, develop a measure of equity between arrests made in poor versus affluent districts. The police could also calculate a ratio of arrests of suspects to death of suspects as to provide an indicator of compliance with human rights standards, the researches said.

On that note, they also criticised the use of force by the police in both countries as a means of controlling crime. Frogglesong and Stone said the strategy had not proven to have an effect on the rate of homicides and public safety and so needed to be controlled.

They further argued that while the reduction in homicides was welcome, the police also needed to to develop tests that would show that reduction in murders was also having a positive effect on other types of offences. They suggested:"The government could also conduct a more nuanced and a reliable analysis of the relationship of homicide to shootings, robberyand breaking perhaps for a specific parish where the confidence of the public in the police is growing and thus the quality of reported data is better."

Accountability

While commending the government of both countries for its move to build confidence in the justice system with the establishment of an internal investigative arm and public complaints units also, Froggelsong and Stone noted that more needed to be done in order to ensure that other authorities within the criminal justice system were also held accountable.

The team recommended that a post for a national justice commissioner or ombudsman to investigate complaints against persons in the criminal justice system be created. They noted that this was particularly lacking in Jamaica as the Dominican Republic could take its complaints to the InterAmerican Court on Human Rights, while in Jamaica complainants could only go to the Supreme Court.

Rate of recidivism

Frogglesong and Stone also commended the efforts of the Jamaica Correctional Services to compile data to indicate the rate of recidivism, but noted that the position in which the department is placed left it at a disadvantage.

"The Jamaican Department of Correctional Services is attempting, with this new indicator to measure exactly what it should measure: the contribution of the prisons to the reduction of recidivism and implicitly to increase public safety. The problem is not its ambition, but its poor placement in the justice system to carry out this task," the researchers said.

They said prisons are too far from fresh acts of crime and violence to contribute to its suppression. They said what was needed was a system that tracked the re-arrest of released prisoners or surveys that captured the experiences of released prisoners over period of a month to a year after release. This survey, they suggested, would allow officials and prevention programmes to identify some of the proximate causes of reoffending.