http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20050320/focus/focus2.html
Published: Sunday | March 20, 2005

CRIME IS Jamaica's biggest problem. How could it be otherwise when we have probably the world's highest murder rate? No wonder everyone has a crime-fighting plan.

At one end of the spectrum are the 'complete transformers'. They argue that to bring crime under control, we need to rebuild our entire society - educate the young, revamp our economy, transform our justice system, re-engineer our security forces and reform our constitution.

Now, there's a lot of truth here. Only a country with deep-seated social problems could produce people who so easily slaughter each other. Sadly, we have produced a generation of human wolves, young men ready to rape and kill without remorse any defenceless person who crosses their path. They value neither their lives nor anyone else's.

We definitely need to implement long-term solutions and at least try not to make the same mistakes with the young. But if we do not address the short term, crime may so weaken the social bonds of this country that our immediate future will resemble the chaos of a Haiti or Iraq.

Over the past 15 years, the annual murder count has risen inexorably from 500 to 1,000 to 1,500 and shows no signs of even stabilising. At this rate, it is only a matter of time before the situation in Spanish Town becomes the norm for the entire country.

This is why an increasing number of people are crying "Bring back Rennet!" Give police carte blanche to shoot suspected criminals, they say, and our murder rate will plummet. This was the stance the late Dr. Carl Stone took in the early 1990s. He argued that in every part of Jamaica, there are known murderers and robbers who walk the streets freely. But because people are so scared of testifying against them, these men continue to wreak havoc on their communities with impunity. The frustrated police can do nothing, because what is the point of arresting someone who no one will give evidence against? But is it really fair to allow these few thousand 'bad men' to hold a complete country at ransom? Is it not far better from a societal point of view to allow the police to 'eliminate' these cancers on society?

ELIMINATE THE CRIMINALS

Dr. Stone's proposals raised a storm of controversy. But this graph shows that between 1981 and 2004, the murder rate skyrocketed as police killings fell.

Cause and effect? The Dr. Stone-minded would say yes. As one man said, heatedly, to me the other day, "Well, it used to work, because in the 1980s, I could walk about in relative peace. So why not try it again? What we going to wait for? Until we have 2,000 murders a year?"

Now, liberal democrats ­ among whom I still count myself ­ are horrified by this kind of talk. If we allow or encourage our police to become death squads, where will it end? Is not the principle of due process the very core of civilisation? Do we really want to start on a slippery slope that has so often led to guerrilla civil war? And while our incessantly-increasing murder rate is making such arguments far less resonant than they once were, the idea of state sanctioned murder still horrifies me.

But, if we cannot 'exterminate' these 'bad boys' who are terrorising the country, why can we not lock them up? That is what the United States did ­ and it worked. During 1991 and 2000, the U.S. prison population almost doubled and the U.S. homicide rate almost halved.

Some attributed this sharp decline in America's murder rate to a strong economy, changing demographics, 'broken window' policies, 'innovative' policing strategies, gun control laws, and increased capital punishment. But in Understanding Why Crime Fell In The 1990s, Steven D. Levitt found that the biggest reason the U.S. murder rate fell by 42 per cent over the decade was increased incarceration. Which was brought about mainly by tougher legislation, including plea bargaining, mandatory sentencing, and 'three strikes and you are out' - a third conviction meaning a life sentence - laws.

The logic is simple, really. If you cannot nab them for the big crimes, get them on the small ones. We should change our laws so that the next time anyone with more than one conviction for violent crime comes before the judge, even for pickpocketing or shoplifting, he will be automatically jailed until at least 50. There are very few 'bad men' older than this, for aggression diminishes with age. So you do not have to kill a man to render him harmless to society. Just keep him in prison until his testosterone runs out.

If this approach worked in America, why can it not work here? By any standards, Jamaica imprisons far less people than its situation warrants. Here is a comparison to some other English-speaking countries.

Even a doubling would only bring us in line with Barbados and Trinidad. All the other countries have substantially increased their incarceration rates since 1992, while Jamaica's has actually fallen at a time when murder here is soaring. We probably have the lowest incarceration to murder rate ratio in the world. How can it make sense that we have the same 4,000 capacity prison system today as in 1990, when more than 13,000 murders have been committed in 15 years?

No wonder police complain that hardened criminals are regularly let out of prison early to make space for new convicts. And repeat offenders are known to commit a disproportionate number - some claim a majority - of crimes. The 20-80 rule - 20 per cent of customers generate 80 per cent of activity - likely applies in crime, as well as business.

Our authorities keep saying 'We do not have the resources to build more prisons'. Well, Jamaica's murder rate is now such that the argument really is "How can we not afford to build more prisons?" We could even try a similar privatisation approach to prisons as we did with highways. It has successfully been used in places like South Africa and the U.S. Personally, I would like to see a bipartisan commission set up to study this issue immediately. For, if it becomes a political football, we will still be bemoaning our lack of prison space and record murder rates 10 years hence.

MORE IMPRISONMENT

Cutting crime means not only putting more people in jail but also getting more efficient. Our judicial system's greatest weakness is witness intimidation. So, let us abolish preliminary trials, which put fear in the hearts of testifiers and make court cases excessively costly and time consuming. We also need to give every judge a laptop, computerise our fingerprint and ballistic databases, get international standard crime scene investigation units, and create a deportee monitoring system.

Still, as the song says, let's start at the very beginning. Which is getting and keeping repeat offenders behind bars.