Martin HenryTHE COUNTRY is tied up with the cords of fear and held to ransom by a handful of professional criminals. While the crime rate is extraordinarily high, crime is not nearly as widespread as the anxiety factor would suggest. Crime is highly localised into patterns by gender, age, geographical location and, very importantly, by personality and background of the criminal.
The real cause of our alarm is the predatory criminal whose business, at least part-time, is crime. There are surprisingly few such persons. If any large proportion of the numerous persons who are exposed to the conditions which allegedly breed crime became criminals, a society such as ours would be totally over-run by crime and criminals.
The real surprise is that there are so few criminals. Anybody who knows the inner city communities, infamous for their violence, can confirm that the vast majority of citizens in these communities are not criminals in the sense of being active perpetrators of attacks upon others' persons and property. An important factor which cannot be overlooked in crime-fighting, however, is the fact that crime is a major business in the sustenance of many communities, a situation which has enjoyed covert political complicity.
Quite unfortunately, the sometimes laborious task of cranking out a weekly newspaper column has been made considerably easier in recent weeks because of the renewed national focus on crime. I tap into my crime files from which a battery of columns have already been drawn during previous crime crisis periods. I dust off data, and I'm on my way. But I would much prefer the usual labours to the painful ease of this terrible deja vu.
So who is holding 2.5 million people to ransom? A number of US criminological studies over many years, as reported by Eugene H. Methvin in Policy Review July/August 1997 in his article Mugged by Reality, have indicated that "a very violent criminal population of a small number of nasty, brutal offenders who begin early in life are responsible for over 50 per cent of all offences and two-thirds of the violent crimes. The recurring approximate figure is seven per cent of the young male population making up the core population of criminals."
Among the "dirty seven percenters", there is a smaller group of "Super Predators" about two per cent of professional criminals. When researchers questioned convicts for robbery in prisons in three states of the USA, most of them acknowledged that they had committed many more crimes than the ones for which they were convicted. But while the least active 50 per cent of these convicts did about six burglaries per year, the most active 10 per cent were doing an average of 230 hits per year!
We know that here, in Jamaica, as elsewhere, the most serious predators on people and property begin their trade early and reach their peak in their late teens to early 20s. There are no old gunmen. We know that among our violent criminals there is an even smaller number of "dog hearts" who ruthlessly kill and destroy.
Hopefully we also know that the shockingly low arrest and conviction rate is sending a powerful signal to our dirty seven percenters (or whatever the figure is) that crime pays, or at least carries no great cost to them.
Punishment works. From detailed study of the issue, one psychologist Sarnoff A. Mednick has arrived back at the conclusion held over thousands of years of social history: "punishment is very effective in suppressing crime, and it does not have to be severe if you get on them early enough". One of the main ways to reduce the prison population, the number of confirmed criminals and the level of crime, is to catch and appropriately punish first offenders.
An old colleague, Faith Linton, won The Gleaner's Silver Pen Award for July for her letter to the editor which "traced the deterioration of social values, and the resultant increase in crime and violence to the breakdown of family life in the country". "The breakdown of the male-female relationships", wrote Mrs. Linton, "spawns more evils than we realise. It seriously compromises the development of the child's character and personality".
Let's go easy with single causes and solutions for complex social phenomena. But Faith is standing on solid ground. "There is a wealth of evidence in the professional literature of criminology and sociology", wrote Patrick F. Fagan in IMPRIMIS, October 1995, "to suggest that the breakdown of family is the real root cause of crime..."
Fagan, after stating that "there is a strong, well-documented pattern of circumstances and social evolution in the life of a future violent criminal", identifies five basic stages: stage one parental neglect and abandonment of the child in early home life. Stage two the embryonic gang becomes a place for him to belong. Stage three he joins a delinquent gang. Stage four he commits violent crime and the full-fledged criminal gang emerges. Stage five a new child, and a new generation of criminal is born.
Single-parent families
When the future violent criminal is born, his father has already abandoned the mother. He is raised in a neighbourhood with a high concentration of single-parent families. He does not become securely attached to his mother during the critical years of his life. He suffers one or more forms of abuse. There is much harshness in his home and he is deprived of affection.
He grows to satisfy his needs by exploiting others. By age 11 his bad habits and attitudes, including aggression, are well established. By age 15 he engages in criminal behaviour. His companions are the main source of his personal identity and his sense of belonging. Most of the crimes he and his friends commit are in their own neighbourhood. He fathers his first child as a teenager and abandons the mother.
Soon after his appointment four years ago, the shiny new Police Commissioner, Francis Forbes, in a JAMPRESS interview said it was critical to catch potential criminals at the point in the cycle where their criminal life starts. "It is almost like a production line. If you wait until it is produced then you smash or repair it. You deal with it at the beginning. So it is with a criminal", he said.
Forbes went on to point out that "in the criminal life cycle, when there are indications that a class or group of individuals fits the profile of becoming deviants, there needs to be early intervention to prevent them from developing into such. We (should not) wait until they become professionals in the business".
Seriously exacerbating the Jamaican problem has been the situation, which Commissioner Forbes well knows, of linking plain criminality to political warfare. Not only did 'The War' open up the flow of weapons, but it has had an even more profound negative impact on attitudes towards the law and the value of human life as well as on the social stability of families and communities. It has helped to engender a steady supply of the Super Predators who are terrorising a cowering society.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
