Crime, Hope and Fear in the Bahamas

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

Even as violent crime declined in Britain, then Prime Minister Tony Blair captured the usually visceral public reaction to crime: “It is not about statistics; it is about how people feel … the fear of crime is as important in some respects as crime itself.”

While Bahamian officials battle the complex phenomenon of crime, they also face a complex response of both reasonable and not so reasonable public and private fear as they respond to the national insecurity violent crime engenders.

A frustrated public has lost considerable confidence in the criminal justice system. Vigorous action to repair it will help reduce both the crime rate and society’s fears by restoring trust in the country’s ability to cope with violent crime.

Our crime fight in some ways resembles a counterinsurgency. Unless we successfully tamp down daily outbursts of violent crime, we risk failure in our efforts to confront those conditions which give rise to crime.

Amidst a disturbing increase in school violence and some particularly gruesome high profile murders, the crime news is more mixed and potentially more hopeful than suggested by the headlines.

While there is quite disparate opinion on how to tackle crime at its roots, we have an emerging consensus on a combination of tools which may help push back against a criminal cohort emboldened by our inability to stem their assault on person and property.

These tools centre around the ability of the criminal justice system to give suspects fair and speedy trials; confront serious offenders with comprehensive and effective rehabilitative and reintegration measures; and divert nonviolent offenders into more promising options.

We now know that rather than an extraordinary upswing in criminal activity by new offenders, much of our current crisis was avoidable. In 2005 the Privy Council, concerned about the length of time suspects often spent on remand prior to trial, ruled that many of these individuals were eligible for bail.

The Lords upheld the principles of fair and speedy trials and that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. But that ruling, followed by an anemic response to the judgment, produced unintended consequences and a perfect storm that is responsible for much of the increase in violent crime.

The numbers are arresting. In 2006, a year after the Privy Council ruling, 35 percent of suspects apprehended for murder were on bail at the time of their most recent offence. Between January to September 2007 that number grew to 42 percent, including 10 people previously charged with murder.

That 42 percent translates to 22 people on bail who have now been rearrested. It suggests that if these individuals were not out on bail the murder count for last year would have been at or lower than the 2006 level.

What about other violent crimes? As of September 2007, 39 people charged with rape and 189 with armed robbery were out on bail. The time-bomb question: how much additional violent crime will we suffer in 2008 and beyond because we failed to respond swiftly to the Privy Council ruling?

The chorus of sensationalists, apologists and fear merchants, happy to rush into the public square – often in time for the evening news – offering shopworn and sometimes baseless theories for the rise in crime, might now want to pause and consider more basic and less dubious reasons for the upswing.

They may also consider more quotidian measures, rather than dramatic gestures, which may actually reduce criminal activity. On this front the news is mixed but heading in the right direction. After some fits and starts, Prison Superintendent Dr. Elliston Rahming is leading a critical national security battlefront: prison transformation and prisoner rehabilitation.

The decision of the former and current administrations to respectively hire and retain Dr. Rahming is a welcome example of bipartisan cooperation and a recognition that targeting recidivism is central to our core crime fighting arsenal. While much lip service has been given to rehabilitation, it is often misunderstood, misrepresented and misdirected.

Most Bahamians equate rehabilitation with coddling. Some commentators have grown cynical about its potential while others overestimate what is achievable. Rehabilitation is not a panacea but, if carefully targeted at criminogenic or crime-producing risk factors, it has been shown to reduce re-offending.

A rehabilitative culture which relies mostly on talking-to, fire and brimstone sermons, scared-straight theatrics and a boot camp mentality needs to be replaced by long-term deep intervention strategies which, though not easy, will prove more enduring.

These could include a pilot restorative justice project which may allow victims to confront offenders while enabling the latter to take greater responsibility for their crime and make tangible amends.

Dr. Rahming, his officers and others charged with rehabilitative welfare deserve additional resources and increased public support in the most ambitious prison reform drive since independence. There is a great deal civil society can do to aid these efforts.

This includes financial and in-kind support from corporate citizens and more ambitious assistance by the religious community. Suppose half of the churches in New Providence each agreed to accompany just three inmates for a substantial part of their time in medium security, and for several years after their release?

Such a carefully-designed and measurable programme would boost the rehabilitative possibilities, including targeted assistance to the families of inmates, who also have their lives disrupted by what is now the 11th-highest incarceration rate worldwide.

While peace vigils, preaching, prison visits and public gestures foster public awareness, they are no substitute for sustained and targeted interventions, which will require the Church community to give more of the time, talent and treasure critical to reducing new crimes by seasoned offenders.

There is another effective route to reverse the rate of offending: diversion of nonviolent offenders into practical, measurable and sustainable alternative sentences. We keep telling many of these offenders to watch the company they keep. Then we often turn around and place them in the care of even worse company in the persons of serious violent offenders.

Now, in lieu of getting a high school diploma, they are offered the opportunity to graduate from prison with a degree in advanced criminality. Alternative measures, more costly in the first instance, will save lives and be more cost-effective long-term.

This may require scaling up and creating new networks of hope including: community-based mentoring; training and coaching in basic life-skills; residential and immersion type job training; drug treatment and testing; intensive community service-learning opportunities; and other types of firm, but respectful forms of intensive supervision and monitoring.

These initiatives require a bold rethink of a mixture of programmes which have shown various levels of success including current alternative sentencing laws, YEAST, Project SURE, the Simpson Penn Centre for Boys, and the Williemae Pratt Centre for Girls, among others.

Making the criminal justice side of the crime equation more effective and efficient is a necessary antidote to the mentality that we are approaching or have passed the point-of-no-return.

Ironically, this brand of fatalism is alternatively cynical and naïve. It distorts the facts and refuses to recognize that we have many of the tools necessary to combat crime. It rewards lazy thinking, grandstanding and sensationalism.

Our urgent task is to weed out the brush and brambles which clutter our thinking about crime; nurture efforts that appear to work; and plant new initiatives which promise to reduce not just crime, but also much of the fear under which we now labour.

Comments

[us]

we've been saying that for years

[Bob Knaus]

There is an alternative, which has been tried in the US with mixed success -- speedy and fair trials, followed by VERY lengthy incarcerations with little chance of parole.

It has the benefit of separating criminals from victims during their prime crime-comitting years, and has the long-term benefit of removing criminality from the gene pool during prime reproductive years as well.

The downsides are obvious -- it requires a hardhearted culture, it is quite expensive to incarcerate all the criminals, and it runs the risks of being branded "genocide" for particular segments of society.

No easy choices there.