In 1955 Jamaica recorded 20 murders and our homicide rate was about 1 per 100,000. This was slightly above Britain’s, about the same as Barbados’s and about a quarter of America’s. In 1999 Jamaica recorded 848 murders or a rate of about 33 per 100,000. This was over 15 times that of Britain, and about 5 times that of Barbados and the USA.

In his article on August 25 Anthony S. Johnson looked at the Jamaica’s crime rate in a global context. He convincingly argued that such factors as media exposure, education, religion, drugs, poverty, and policing cannot account for our extraordinarily high homicide rate, which was the 6^th highest of the 88 countries reporting to the UNDP up to 1994.

There can be no doubt that in the 1970s politicians actively fomented violence and armed their supporters. The leap in homicides from 1979 to 1980 was certainly of civil war proportions. But to its credit the incumbent government in the end accepted the judgment of the ballot box and crime returned to “normal”.

Politics is still a major factor in crime, for organized inner city drug and extortion gangs still maintain a residual party allegiance. But it is not the main driving force behind the present violence that is causing many who can afford it to emigrate. The problem goes much deeper. Domestic violence, which has nothing to do with politics, has also soared. As Mr. Johnson says, we have a serious crime problem because we have a serious child-rearing problem.

Jamaica not only has one of the world’s highest murder rates, we have probably its highest out of wedlock birth rate. Over 85% of Jamaican babies are born to unmarried mothers and over 50% have no registered father. A country with such a fractured family structure will always have a high propensity to violence, no matter what its political system.

Studies in the USA have shown fatherlessness to be a critical factor in explaining crime. To quote David Popenoe in “Life Without Father”

“The relationship between family structure and crime is so strong that controlling for family configurations erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime…”

Some say Jamaica has always had a high rate of “illegitimacy”, and so it cannot be the main explanation for the dramatic increase in crime over the past half century. The Registrar General and Statistics Institute of Jamaica have no historical records. But anecdotal evidence suggests that not only has our out of wed lock birth rate increased, but a major change in the nature of “illegitimacy” has taken place.

Many of the out of wedlock births in the past were to common law parents who may not have been legally wedded but acted as if they were. So their children grew up in a stable two parent home. Furthermore when Jamaica was primarily a rural society, children were raised within an extended family of grandmothers and grandfathers. Today the situation is very different. In many inner city communities, where the illegitimate birth rate is often over 95%, a child’s mother is often the only family it will ever know.

No one is trying to disparage single parents or their children. Most single mothers raise wonderfully successful children, and nuclear family offspring can grow up to be menaces to society. And only a minority of fatherless men become criminals. But if we continue to pretend that absent fatherhood does children no harm, we will always have frightening levels of violence.

In the early 1960s the American “illegitimacy” rate was 23% for blacks and 4% for whites. It is now 33% overall and 68% for blacks. For years most Americans would not discuss this taboo phenomenon, and those who talked about it were accused of blaming the victims. But reality cannot be ignored. For while illegitimacy rates soared, so did crime, which reached record levels in 1980.

So America simply began locking up people. Laws were passed making it easier to arrest and convict, and between 1980 and 1989 the US prison population doubled. In the next decade it doubled again. The supposed ‘land of the free’ now has the world’s highest incarceration rate. (It is over 5 times Jamaica’s.) The USA has 5% of the world’s population but over 25% of its prisoners. But the hard core approach worked. Between 1989 and 1999 the American homicide rate fell by a half.

In the British liberal tradition criminals are viewed as misguided unfortunates who it is prison’s goal to rehabilitate. The US takes the view that law breakers are menaces to society to be locked away for as long as possible and murderers should be executed. Like many other things in American life it is ugly in theory and oppresses a minority of people, but works in practice and increases the quality of life of the majority.

Countries like Britain, Canada and Western Europe show that it is possible to have both low crime and imprisonment rates. But these places have a highly educated populace. The brutal reality may well be that a democracy with high illiteracy and “illegitimacy” rate has two choices – a high crime rate and low incarceration rate, or a high incarceration rate and a low crime rate.

Jamaica’s social problems have many complex roots, and the long term solution is clearly education. And unemployment and poverty are obviously major factors in crime. But the only way for the Jamaican economy to grow is to attract more overseas investors and tourists. Unfortunately our high crime reputation is making Jamaica an increasingly unattractive place to visit or invest in. The only way to rapidly lower our murder rate to levels that visitors and investors find acceptable may well be to adopt draconian American methods.

An old wisecrack says a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, while a liberal is a conservative who has gone to jail. And a lot more Jamaicans have been the victims of crime than have gone to jail.

In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion Pickering asks Doolittle “Have you no morals, man?” “Can't afford them, Governor” he replies. Looking at the inexorable rise in violent crime the question occurs - can Jamaica afford its liberal principles? changkob@hotmail.com