Garth Rattray

The new year started out with many very noticeable bangs that resonated throughout every corner of society. They left several people (even policemen) dead, some people maimed (including an 18-month-old child), and others injured.

It's interesting that the editorial of the Sunday Observer (January 07, 2007), boldly stated, "Those among us who promulgate, and even believe this fallacy that poverty breeds crime, are only fooling themselves." Contradictory perhaps was the Sunday Gleaner of that same day. It published, 'Face to face with a gunman'. In it, Pastor Glen Samuels describes his encounter with a gunman two years ago. His assailant made it clear that his reason for renting a gun to rob was poverty and his inability to get a job. The pastor described how financial help, counselling and mentoring "radically transformed" that young man's life.

We certainly have monsters among us. Anyone that can cold-bloodedly kill men, women and children is a monster, a coward and evil beyond words. But, we must ask ourselves, where did they come from? Who or what spawned them? Who or what is to blame for this plague of unadulterated violence, mayhem and carnage? It seems that the only thing keeping us from being gunned down is whether or not a criminal wants you or me dead. The bold and public slaying of policemen leaves many thinking that our protectors are very vulnerable and that we are at the mercy of warped criminals.

The ultimate cure for violent crime lies in social intervention. The proof that poverty plays a major role in crime (especially violent crime) is plain to see in the demography of our prisons. Poverty is a crippling, demoralising, frustrating, frightening, embarrassing and potentially deadly disease. Poverty begets more poverty and with the enrichment of a few within society, it becomes the divergent negative from which many ills spring.

It's incongruous that some people are able to purchase cars that cost over twenty million dollars and that far more than just a few can buy homes that fetch over forty million dollars yet many adults and children live in squalor and go to bed hungry everyday. Ours is a society that demonstrates an extremely wide social spectrum and (therefore) extreme social inequities. With the admixture of opulent mansions, super-high salaries, expensive prestige motor-vehicles, poverty, political tribalism, fragmented family units, gang affiliations, the drug and gun trade, we must expect negative repercussions - like corruption, hostility, volatility, crime and violence.

We always find emergency funding for recurrent natural disasters while poverty - an ongoing economic disaster - has been plaguing our people for many years. It's full time that we find the money to combat it. We must provide employment opportunities, clean and safe communities, affordable amenities, access to food, clothes and shelter, free healthcare and free education (for our young children) through innovative financial planning for wealth redistribution. Everyone knows that the dons and some politicians establish themselves within poor communities by providing most of these things in exchange for fealty and a sort of serfdom. Although Jesus said that the poor will always be with us, it is society's duty to see that people do not suffer because of poverty.

With the possible exception of some deported (American-schooled felons), it is our society that has bred and nurtured these vicious monsters that kill and maim with impunity. Poverty does not directly produce heartless and violent criminals but it provides the social, economic and physical breeding ground for extreme anti-social behaviour.\