By Kevin Baldeosingh
This essay examines the institutional and historical factors which have created the high levels of crime in Trinidad and Tobago. It posits fundamental connections between all these factors, on the premise that human nature has certain innate tendencies which, in particular social environments, make criminal activity a rational adaptation.
The child of the father
"Holistic" is a favourite buzzword of politicians and other conmen. This is because it sounds vaguely technical but it also has that New Age mystic connotation. Fools and foolers always like rhetoric that makes them sound both smart and spiritual.
The term "holism" refers to an ordered grouping that results in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. But when religious believers and mystics and pseudo-intellectuals talk about tackling problems from a "holistic perspective", they usually mean praying or meditating or praising or other worthless methods of dealing with concrete issues. And when National Security Minister Howard Chin Lee talks about a "holistic approach" to fighting crime, he hasn't a clue what he means.
Nonetheless, it is true that crime can be effectively battled only on several simultaneous fronts. Efficient policing is absolutely necessary in both the short- and long-term. But effective policies are even more crucial than effective policing. The right economic, legal, political, psychological, and educational strategies are essential if we want to stop throwing up more and more criminals.
The good news is, if we adopt even some of the right approaches, Trinidad and Tobago can have minimum levels of crime in 30 years. Not before that, because it's going to take at least one generation to repair the damage that demagogue politics, socialist economics, blank slate psychology, fundamentalist religion, and edifice education have wrought.
The problem is, these paradigms still dominate our thinking, if not all our actions, and as long as that is so it will be almost impossible to institute policies which might actually reduce the crime rate. In this essay, I'll be looking at each of these areas and their relationship to crime. But I want to start with our most fundamental error: a mistaken concept of human nature.
This is a grave danger because, as far as I can tell, both experts and laypersons have completely wrong ideas about the roots and causes of violence. Folk and professional wisdom holds that children are innately gentle and peace-loving and only learn to be violent because parents and/or society conditions them that way.
This is utter hogwash. Aggression is an innate drive in all normal human beings, and it is so because if our ancestors on the African savanna had not been aggressive, they wouldn't have survived to reproduce and pass on their aggressive genes. One proof of this is the fact that the most violent age for humans isn't adolescence, as popularly believed, but toddlerhood. In a large study concluded about two years ago, psychologists found that almost half the boys past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting and kicking. So the question, as one of the researchers remarked, isn't how children learn to be aggressive, but how do they learn not to be?
As for adults, psychologists Douglas Kennick and David Buss found that 80 percent of women and 90 percent of men fantasize about killing people they don't like, such as romantic rivals, individuals who have humiliated them, and step-parents. Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, writes, "People in all cultures take pleasure in thinking about killings, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, crime dramas, spy thrillers, Shakespearean tragedies, biblical stories, hero myths and epic poems."
Pinker concludes that "aggression is an organised, goal-directed activity…violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a 'pathology' except in the sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms."
So violence only occurs within quite specific contexts. For example, psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly have done studies showing that crime rates are higher in regions with greater disparities of wealth, and that such disparity is a better predictor of crime than poverty itself. This is partly because chronic low status leads men to become obsessed with status and kill one another over trivial insults. (On this basis, you can also see how kidnapping is an effective strategic response to the conspicuous consumption of Trinidad's elites.)
Other common misconceptions are that poor parenting makes children into criminals, that the media causes violent behaviour, that teaching self-esteem can offset criminal tendencies, and that hanging will reduce crime. Forty-six years ago, it was the implementation of equally mistaken policies that created the socioeconomic conditions we find ourselves in today. If, back then, the powers-that-be, from Dr. Eric Williams to Rudranath Capildeo to the executives in the corporate boardrooms to the academics at UWI to the trade union leaders to the various holy men &endash; if all of them had been attending to the whole rather than to their small parts, then Trinidad and Tobago would today indeed be the paradise we used to boast it was and which it never was.
Crime and economic policies
In Central Trinidad, where I live, you can drive through the villages in the wee hours of the morning and see cars parked in unfenced yards. This couldn't have happened 20 years ago. If you didn't have an enclosed yard, preferably with a locked garage, you would have had to buy car alarm and wheel-, steering- and gas-tank locks. And even then all you could hope to do was delay the thieves.
Twenty years ago, most of the cars Trinidadians bought were assembled from kits imported from Japan. Tariffs made the importation of cars, even second-hand ones, prohibitively expensive. Because of this, and because parts were so costly, there was a thriving car-stealing racket, which involved bandits, garages and auto parts stores. But the recession of the 1980s led to reduced car sales and Neal & Massy and H.E. Robinson were eventually forced to shut down their plants.
Once the foreign-used vehicle business took off, the car-stealing racket naturally collapsed. But if the Manning administration hikes back up car prices, auto theft will once again be added to our major crime problems. There will also be a more subtle effect, since the visibility of the haves and have-nots will increase; and, as I noted in last Thursday's column, a large gap between rich and poor correlates with high crime rates.
The idea behind car assembly plants protected by tariffs was to build a local car-manufacturing industry. This never happened, and it is just our most prominent example of the wrong-headedness of protectionist policies. The country's economy is now more liberalised but, as Kirk Meighoo pointed out in his last Sunday Express column, the number of State enterprises has actually increased over the past decades.
It is thus not surprising that socialist rhetoric and ideas still dominate the public mind now, as they did in the 1960s. Back then, the GNP of countries in East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean were roughly equal. Nearly every nation in the latter three regions decided to pursue socialist policies or to set up "mixed economies" where the State controlled "the commanding heights of the economy". The East Asian countries, however, shifted from tight control over protected domestic markets to export-led private-enterprise systems. Gary Becker, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for his work in behavioural economics, notes, "At that time, this shift was unprecedented in Third World countries, where the prevailing ideology was socialism and government management. Reliance on the private sector allowed their businessmen and labour forces to take advantage of the enormous opportunities in the world marketplace."
It is now an established fact that free trade promotes economic growth. The anti-capitalists, unable to deny this rationally, instead argue that such growth only makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. But a paper written by David Dollar and Aart Kraay of the World Bank, which examined growth patterns in 80 countries over four decades, found that incomes of the poor rises one-for-one with overall growth, that the effect of growth on income of the poor is no different in poor countries than in rich ones, and that openness to foreign trade benefits the poor to the same extent that it benefits the whole economy.
The dominance of ideology over analysis was exacerbated in Trinidad and Tobago because we had oil (plus leftist lecturers in the Social Sciences department at UWI). As in the Arab countries, oil wealth replaced real economic development and exacerbated official corruption. It is worth noting that the most successful nation in the Anglophone Caribbean, Barbados, is the only one which retained an open economy.
The social and political norms shaped by these economic policies have helped create our present crisis. People become criminals when they believe that "the good life" &endash; i.e. status &endash; is acquired more efficiently through illegal acts rather than through hard work and talent. This belief is created when the elites either acquire wealth illegitimately or handle it irresponsibly. In a corrupt and skewed economy, the poor know that hard work will pay few or no dividends. Crime and violence is a rational adaptation to such an environment.
So rethinking our economic ideology is an intrinsic part of battling crime. In his book on globalisation, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lists the following strategies needed for a country to achieve economic prosperity: privatising State-owned industries and utilities, removing or lowering tariffs on imported goods, low inflation and price stability, reducing State bureaucracy, having a balanced budget, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, deregulating capital markets, making the currency convertible, and minimising government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks.
Friedman calls this the "Golden Straitjacket" and, while he admits it can pinch, notes that when such policies are implemented "your economy grows and your politics shrinks".
But our politicians have always resisted any measures which might reduce their power: which is why it is fair to say that politicians have always been this country's biggest criminals.
Leading criminals
The most dangerous criminals in our society are the politicians. This assertion wouldn't be too hard to prove empirically: one would just have to list the long roll of scandals, from DC-9 to Millennium Airport, to make a watertight case. But such an exercise would be like shooting crabs in a calabash. The body politic's incompetence, unethicality and corruption are symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. So the real question is this: why is our political culture the way it is?
My view is that the ethos of any group, whether it is a book club or a business organisation or a nation, is shaped by its leaders. Of course, leaders attain their positions because the group, even if by default, allows them to lead. No single leader ever has so much charisma, intelligence, strength and energy that he can challenge the fundamental beliefs, mores or motivations of the group or, in the case of the State, the elite groups within the society. And that foundation ethos is often the result of geography, ecology and history, which cannot be changed.
Even so, since human nature does not vary between cultures, I believe that it is the leaders who do most to determine the attitudes and values of the wider society. Funnily enough, the most telling argument against my thesis has always been Dr. Eric Williams. Williams, after all, was an intellectual and an atheist. Yet, just five years after his death, the party he founded was being led by a born-again Christian who wouldn't recognise an idea if it slapped him in the face and danced the hokey-pokey.
It may be true that the luck of holding a PNM stronghold initially put Patrick Manning in the saddle, but if the ethos of the PNM was dominated by Williams's intellectualism and secularism, Manning would have been flung off long ago. So the puzzle to me was, if my theory was correct, why didn't Williams's superior attributes exert more of an influence over the PNM party?
The short answer is this: Dr. Eric Williams was an authoritarian leader. PNM apologists like to claim that Williams believed in democratic principles, citing various speeches and, especially, the fact that he didn't become a dictator after the Opposition boycotted Parliament in 1972. But Williams was a democrat only in the original sense of the word, when it was an epithet used to describe "a person who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses".
What more accurately reflects Williams's political values was his refusal to grant private radio and TV licenses during his entire 25 years as Prime Minister, his shelving of the Wooding Commission's report on Constitutional reform, his blind eye to the massive corruption which happened under his watch and, as pointed out by Kirk Meighoo in the Sunday Express, his reintroduction of the Crown Colony system of government in 1961.
In this sense, one sees that both Manning and Rowley are in fact very apt inheritors of Williams. Attitudes are passed on more easily than ideas and, in order for the party and the nation to have inherited respect for intellectualism and secularism, Williams would have had to be a democrat in the modern sense: a person who respects freedom of speech, the rule of law, and individual rights.
This kind of democracy is essential for economic prosperity, which of course is the ultimate solution for reducing crime. It is not coincidental that the most violent regions in the world are also the least democratic. The best proof of this principle is the Islamic societies and their followers, which are involved in 80 percent of the world's armed conflicts. A United Nations Development Programme report released last year pointed out that, out of seven key regions on the planet, the Arab region scores lowest on civil liberties, political rights, independent media, and government accountability. Forty years ago, the Arab region had a higher GDP than that of East Asia. Today, all 22 Arab states put together have a per capita output less than half that of South Korea alone.
If Trinidad and Tobago never lapsed into formal dictatorship, it is not because of Williams's dominance of the political landscape, but in spite of it. Nor am I laying blame on Williams alone, for even dictators can rule only with the cooperation of other powerful men. If Williams was a Maximum Leader, he was so with the help of the country's businessmen and religious leaders who, like all persons whose authority rests on fortuitous circumstances or on blind faith, prefer totalitarian rule.
The real reasons Trinidad and Tobago never became a dictatorship was because of our multi-ethnicity, our Carnival tradition of mocking authority, British-trained civil servants and judges, oil money, and a sufficient cadre of committed journalists and businessmen who supported the newspapers. But none of these factors were strong enough to instill the democratic ethos which would have helped ensure civil stability today, and all but the first and last features of our society are in decline. This is why democratic reforms of Parliament, political parties and the Constitution are crucial for containing crime.
Religious Crimes
In an interview in the Sunday Guardian (02.0203), Noble Khan, the head of the Inter-Religious Organisation, was asked what the Trinidadian Muslim's position was on the Sharia law which says a woman adulterer ought to be stoned to death. His answer was, "We live under the laws of this land and we have to obey…There is no Sharia court in Trinidad that can carry out what the Sharia law might require in certain circumstances."
In other words, Khan doesn't think that such a law is inherently immoral in all circumstances. It's just that he happens to live in a country which doesn't allow women to be stoned to death. Khan, by the way, is also one of those individuals who saw nothing unethical in being an Independent Senator during the 18-18 deadlock.
In my opinion, Khan's moral mindset makes him an apt representative of both Muslims and the IRO. In this country, religion may well be the most pernicious contributor to the crime crisis, because nearly everyone agrees that we need more religion in order to defeat crime. But, at the very least, one could argue that religions have failed the society. In the nation's prisons, Roman Catholics, who make up 30 percent of our population, account for 45 percent of inmates. Muslims, who are a mere six percent of the population, make up 15 percent of prisoners. The Protestant bodies, which are 30 percent of the population, have a matching percentage of inmates. Only Hindus are an exception: although comprising 25 percent of the population, they account for just 14 percent of prisoners. And there are apparently no atheists in jail.
I do not think, however, that these figures represent just failure on the part of religions. Evolutionary anthropologist David Sloan Wilson, in his book Darwin's Cathedral, writes, "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone…We should think of religious groups as rapidly evolving entities adapting to their current environment."
But, in our society, religion is often maladaptive. Given that religious belief has been the traditional basis by which pre-modern societies organise themselves politically, and given that Trinidad and Tobago is in many ways primitive, I believe that our religions have contributed significantly to the present crisis by helping institutionalise anti-progressive values such as authoritarianism, irrationality, ignorance, and intolerance.
Every religion here is anti-democratic and, as I pointed out in the previous section, a democratic ethos &endash; freedom of speech, rule of law, individual rights - is essential for containing crime. The Maha Sabha was the only group which supported the repressive Equal Opportunities Bill, while Roman Catholics, the largest and wealthiest denomination in the country, try covertly and overtly to stifle freedom of speech in the newspapers and other media, despite the Pope's stricture that the media must be free from special interest pressures. The Catholics' campaign to prevent abortion law reform also reveals their opposition to individual rights.
The political values of the Pentecostal Church, as summed up by Pastor Cuffie in his Newsday column (01.02.03) reflect a fundamental enmity to democratic values. For this $10 million pastor who once applied for a gun licence, a crime-free society requires the elimination of homosexuality, adultery, fornication, gambling, the carrying out of hangings, and the worship of only the Christian god.
Then there's irrationality. At the funeral service for murdered 18-year-old Amanda Rodriguez, Fr Reginald De Four declared confidently, "There is a problem and we have the answer." What was it? "Take the Blessed Sacrament to Laventille." In similar fashion, every religious leader has been calling for prayer and, while prayer can be used to motivate action, in our culture prayer is invariably a formula for avoiding responsibility.
As for ignorance, Seventh Day Adventist pastor Clive Dottin had an article published in the Trinidad Guardian (04.02.03) in which he declared, "We have a high level of intellectual dishonesty in our world. But when the consequences can be devastating we expect that the alarm bells in the conscience would create the catalyst for spiritual transformation."
This, mind you, is a man who once described evolution as "a Satanic theory" and who, in this latest article, painted a portrait of drug addicts as murderers, sex fiends and thieves: a description which is accurate only for a tiny minority of users and which, if it were true, would certainly end all discussion of decriminalisation as an effective method of dealing with drug-related crimes. But this kind of intellectual hypocrisy is typical of almost all religious spokespersons in our society.
Finally, there's intolerance, which is an inherent feature of religion. "Religions are well-known for their in-group morality and out-group hostility," Wilson notes. "Even when groups do evolve into adaptive units, often they are adapted to behave aggressively towards other groups."
This final trait tells us why the solution to the crime crisis won't be found in religions: for no religion can bring the people of the country together to fight crime or, indeed, to do anything else for the greater good. Creating a real society first requires a vision of Trinidad and Tobago and &endash; save for a few voices crying in the wilderness - this is something which our artists, intellectuals, businessmen and politicians have so far failed to provide.
Crime and culture
The most important question for our society has been posed by Lloyd Best: "How does the culture escape itself?"
Culture, in the anthropological sense, is the norms, values, beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and activities of a group of human beings. The purpose of culture is to define the group, motivate its members, and define their relationships with one another and with outsiders. People are basically the same everywhere, so all cultures have common characteristics. The reason cultures are different is because, faced with particular challenges of survival and reproduction in different environments, human groups make cultural adaptations that emphasise different aspects of universal traits.
For example, all cultures have gossip, humour, insults, poetry, rhetoric and music. Slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean resulted in a concatenation of these traits, which led to the creation of calypsos. Calypso was adaptive for the African population, because it became a device which promoted group solidarity and helped undermine the sociopolitical authority of the ruling European elites.
But if culture is adaptive, then why should we need to escape it? There are two reasons. First, neither biological nor cultural adaptations are necessarily perfect. A moral system is a bio-cultural adaptation which is essential for a group's success, but moral systems usually have the following characteristics: conformity, docility, detection and punishment of cheating, and explicit consensus decision-making. In a slave system, these characteristics are exactly what the moral individual cannot achieve or must reject in relation to the wider society.
Second, as the environment changes, adaptations which were once useful may become irrelevant or even harmful. Calypso and Carnival may once have helped mitigate political violence, and perhaps even other kinds of violence, in Trinidad. However, now that Carnival has pretty much become pretty mas, and now that calypso is conventional, these traditions can no longer meet the challenges of the evolving society. Indeed, Carnival and calypso are now part of our society's problem rather than its solution. It is not, after all, coincidental that most of the country's violent criminals are young, male, and Afro-Trini.
Slavery, indentureship, and the plantation economy have created traits defined by Best as unresponsibility, second-class self-concepts, and invalid validating elites. These are maladaptive because they prevent the society from constructing the political organisations which are required to achieve desired goals in the modern world.
So the traits our culture needs to escape from are products of Caribbean history, and history itself is often shaped by ecology, geography and serendipity. But this doesn't mean that history is deterministic. A society, if it has persisted long enough, usually reaches a point where its elites can choose what path the society will take. This, it seems to me, marks the crucial difference between a developed and an undeveloped country. The leaders in a developed society have the conviction that they can direct their societies, whereas the leaders in undeveloped ones think they are the puppets of larger forces.
This lack of self-confidence has two major consequences: tyranny and corruption. After all, if you do not think leadership lends power, then you will only use authority and office to oppress other people and/or feather your nest. This is why the UNC so readily embraced the corrupt political culture which had been created by the PNM. And it is because of such behaviour by the society's elites &endash; politicians, businessmen, academics, doctors, religious spokesmen, and so on &endash; that crime becomes a social norm.
How, then, does a culture change? Dan Sperber, in his book Explaining Culture, describes two concepts: the meme model and the influence model. The first posits cultural change based on a cultural trait "out-reproducing" other traits, while the second posits a trait's success based on its affecting key persons in a society. "Both predict that the most successful items will dominate the culture, and that the culture will evolve as a result of differences in success among competing items," writes Sperber.
Given our oppressive history, it seems to me that the influence model is more pertinent to our society. This being so, changing a culture that facilitates criminal activities will require change on the part of our elites. I do not know how this can be done in a general sense, but I can suggest one concrete measure that will be a good starting point: for the Chamber of Commerce, and one or all three of the daily newspapers, to take an official stance against the death penalty.
This is hardly an original suggestion. Forty years ago, VS Naipaul wrote in The Middle Passage, "[The picaroon society] cannot immediately become responsible; but it can be re-educated only through responsibility. Change must come from the top. Capital punishment and corporal punishment, incitements to brutality, must be abolished."
But even such an inarguably rational measure &endash; for there are absolutely no practical or moral benefits to hanging criminals - is probably beyond the capacity of our society's leaders. Bringing about cultural change through the meme model instead would be more difficult, take much longer, and would have to be done by our artists, intellectuals, journalists, and teachers. But, as Best has also pointed out, it is our educated elites who have helped put us in this mess.
Crime and Education
It is depressingly easy to identify the deficiencies of our education system. Lack of teacher training, overcrowded schools, shift system, irrelevant curricula, unprofessional textbooks. It's a short list, but it is one which has helped create, and continues to create, our crime situation today.
When Dr. Eric Williams decided to use education to get votes, it meant that education was always going to be subservient to electoral politics. Emphasis shifted away from the primary school system to secondary schools. Buildings were built, but not fast enough, so the shift system was introduced. And all these buildings needed teachers to staff them, so a university degree by itself was accepted as sufficient qualification for the hardest job in the world. A revamped educational curriculum, relevant to the needs of a developing society in the modern world, got little or no attention. And publishers, either through connections or bribery, got the Education Ministry to list textbooks written by persons with minimum qualifications for minimum remuneration.
To understand the effects these policies had on our society, we need to understand certain fundamentals of human nature. The first is this: children are socialised by their peer groups, not by their parents. In her book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris writes, "It takes a village to raise a child. But the reason it takes a village is not because it requires a quorum of adults to nudge erring youngsters back onto the paths of righteousness. It takes a village because in a village there are always enough kids to form a play group." It is in such groups that children learn norms and values. What the shift system did was create large groups of purposeless, non-playing children for half the day, and the norms they developed in that context were inevitably negative.
The second thing we need to understand is the optimum size of the social group that human beings feel comfortable in. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that the number 150 occurs again and again in the ethnographic literature. Hunter-gatherer societies, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, all have villages of about 150 persons.
The reason for this is that the human neocortex, the part of the brain that deals with complex thought and reasoning, can only keep track of 150 persons. "The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us," Dunbar writes.
In his book The Tipping Point, science writer Malcolm Gladwell argues, "If we want to develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighbourhoods, this tells us we're probably better off building lots of little schools rather than one or two big ones."
So, from the moment the PNM decided to build large schools, they created incubators for the cultural chaos we are experiencing now. Even so, good teachers could have shaped the attitudes of the students in a positive way, because a good teacher can influence a group of students even against the prevailing norms. Harris writes, "A truly gifted teacher can prevent a classroom of diverse students from falling apart into separate groups and can turn the entire class into an 'us' &endash; an 'us' that sees itself as scholars…as capable and hard-working."
But naturally gifted teachers are exceedingly rare, and training in classroom management, using teaching aids and other pedagogical techniques is necessary for most people. One key characteristic of exceptional classrooms, exceptional schools, and exceptional education systems is this: more attention is given to slow learners. But this never happened here, not even in the prestige schools. After all, as Brother Michael Samuel said when he retired as principal of Presentation College San Fernando, "20 percent [of all students] &endash; no matter what people say, that every boy and girl is teachable, that is nonsense &endash; they are labourers". No wonder, then, that Pres nurtured both Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday.
The St. Augustine campus of UWI was part of the problem. All of the above ills could have been mitigated, if not actually prevented, if there was a strong intellectual culture emanating from the country's highest seat of learning. But, more ivory than most towers, the university was instead populated by a large contingent of pseudo-intellectuals. When they did make public statements, it was mostly to spout leftist and/or Afrocentrist rhetoric. And nowadays, if the articles sent to the newspapers by certain lecturers is any indicator, mysticism and fundamentalist Christianity appear to have superseded these other ideologies.
It is easy to blame politicians for the failures of our education system, but politicians, like every other human group, do what is best for their own interests. University lecturers, on the other hand, supposedly serve their own interests by promoting intellectual work. But, as the late economist Davison Budhoo said after refusing a teaching post at UWI, "There are more politicians than thinkers there". And that is a major reason why, in the ongoing discourse on crime, so many people are talking so much stupidness.
Criminal stupidity
The solutions to our crime situation are not only obvious, but easy. Hang criminals, beat children, ban violent TV shows, give decent citizens guns, and pray. And several of our most eminent citizens say we also need to put microchip implants in criminals, eat less fried chicken, and ban all drugs except Panadol.
Problem is, there are always a few damn fools &endash; also known as "bleeding heart liberals" - who insist that crime can only be effectively tackled by other means. And, to prove how damn dotish they are, they usually argue from empirical and ethical grounds, instead of just quoting the Bible/Bhagvadgita/Qu'ran or, hell, just using plain common sense.
Take hanging. It is true that in no country in the world has the death penalty reduced crime. But that doesn't mean Trinidad and Tobago can't be the sole exception. It may also be true that, after the Chadee gang was hanged in 1999, the murder rate jumped two points by the end of 2000 &endash; i.e. from 7.1 murders per 100,000 persons to 9.1 per 100,000 persons. But so what? Figures don't prove anything, unless you have a figure like Darlene Beddoe's in which case you can prove anything you like. But what's important is that God and the people want criminals to be hanged.
But, if the courts won't do it, at least decent citizens should be given the means to kill criminals when attacked. That, as everyone knows, will lead to a drastic drop in murders and other crimes. Christ, that's why a respected leader like Pastor Cuffie once applied for a handgun yet, despite him being a Lamb of God, his application was refused. Who knows what the Commissioner of Police was thinking? That when they banned handguns in Washington DC, murder and suicide rates dropped 25 percent? Or that the United Kingdom, which bans handguns, has quarter the murder rate of the United States, which doesn't? Or that white cowboy boots don't go with a 357. Magnum?
Mind you, even true believers admit that hangings alone won't do it. Other measures are needed, like banning violent TV shows. And here even those who usually dismiss experts like to quote experts. After all, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics once testified before Congress that 3,500 studies had investigated the connection between violence in the media and violence and 3,482 found links between the two.
The fact that psychologist Jonathan Freedman smelled a rat &endash; how on earth did so many studies on one topic get funded? &endash; and, when he checked the data, discovered that there were only 200 studies on the connection between media and violence &endash; well, so what? Freedman also found that more than half of these studies failed to find any connection, while the remainder found only small correlations which could be readily explained by other causes (that violent children seek out violent entertainment, that children are temporarily aroused but not permanently affected by violent movies). But so what?
It's only damn fools who wonder why people were more violent in the centuries before television and movies were invented, or how come Canadians watch the same movies as Americans but have one-fourth the homicide rate, or how come when television was introduced in the British colony of St. Helena in 1995 children didn't become more violent. But why should anyone care about logical thinking when it's so convenient to blame the media?
This is also why teaching children self-esteem is the best way of battling school violence. Telling them they're wonderful and superior and just as good as anyone else is much easier than actually teaching them skills which might provide a solid basis for such opinions. Our present Education Minister once headed an organisation to give children self-esteem, and she must know what she's talking about, right, or else how could she have attained such high office?
So let us ignore recent studies which show that very high-self esteem is characteristic of violent criminals. After all, local psychologist Dr. Dorrell Philip says just changing the name of Beetham Estate to Eastmoorings will help improve the lives children from that area. Changing street signs is a lot cheaper than improving houses and infrastructure and the education system and, what with plans to build a new multi-million-dollar Parliament building, we certainly need to watch every penny.
But, although everybody says that we need to revamp the education system in order to stem violence, we needn't do difficult things like stop corporal punishment. After all, all the adults say "I got licks and look how good I turn out". Mind you, all the prisoners in jail also got real licks when they were children. But what does that prove? It's obviously all the non-beaten individuals who have the society in the mess it's in.
So that is what we need to do. The only alternative is to use methods which have been actually researched and proven to work, which I will list. You see, I belong to the minority of damn fools who actually believe in a rational approach to fighting crime.
Proposed solutions
I have examined human psychology, economic strategies, our political norms, our education system, religion, culture, and our common beliefs to show how all have contributed to the high levels of crime in our country. After all, you can't fix a problem unless you first define the problem to be fixed. And a definition, if rigorous enough, always suggests a solution.
Once we know what we've done wrong, we can do the right thing. But the right thing in crime has to happen at three levels: short- , medium- and long-term. I'm not even going to deal with short-term measures, because Police Commissioner Hilton Guy strikes me as a man more than competent in this area. Of course, the problem with short-term measures is that they can only be short-term: besides being expensive, they become ineffectual as criminals adapt and police officers grow weary.
Before this happens, then, the society has to institute medium-term measures which will have concrete effects on crime within a three- to fifteen-year span. The measures are medium-term in that, like short-term measures, they target criminals without attempting to reduce criminal activity. The latter is the aim of long-term measures.
What, then, discourages persons from committing crimes? Basically, a belief that there is a high chance that they will be caught and imprisoned. This belief reduces crimes such as assault and theft and perhaps rape, because these crimes are usually planned, unlike murder which is almost always a crime of passion. So the first medium-term plan is to get more police officers into the force and out on the streets. Contrary to the Chin Lee approach, it has been shown that apprehension and incarceration are twice as effective as longer sentences in reducing crime.
However, police officers cannot be out there just to arrest young black men, although aggressive stop-and-frisks will certainly help reduce the number of weapons. But officers must also be intelligently deployed. The Central Statistical Office has an essential role to play, for if the police patrol poor neighbourhoods with a high proportion of young males between ages 16 to 25, crime will be reduced in short order.
A couple of other facts from social psychology may useful to a finessed crime-fighting strategy: violent crime increases on hotter days and in hotter seasons; and the consumption of alcohol is a factor in the greater percentage of murders, muggings and rapes: both with the perpetrators and their victims.
But it is community policing, or problem-oriented policing, which has been proven most effective. In this approach, the police share responsibility with citizens for identifying and solving crimes. This leads to a drop in crime and fewer arrests. Detection is also crucial. This means that the police have to be more thoroughly trained and be given up-to-date technology. There must be effective monitoring and reviews of police performance at the district level through regular meetings. Such meetings, along with reliable crime statistics, will allow the police to target their enforcement to changing crime trends. It will also be necessary to give the CoP more authority, so he can reduce bureaucracy, promote more ambitious managers, and delegate more authority to station commanders.
But dealing with blue-collar crime alone is never sufficient. Indeed, it can exacerbate violent crime if justice is seen to be biased in favour of the rich. And white-collar crime can be far more pernicious than other kinds. Such crime requires special investigative skills, like accountancy and computer expertise, and a special arrangement will have to be set up for this. But it is also important to have the right kind of punishments for white-collar crimes.
Economist Gary Becker suggests, "If there are appropriate fines, there is no reason to jail officials of corporations that commit security fraud, anti-trust violations, tax evasions and similar crimes. Directors of companies that pay large fines for crimes committed by their officials have an incentive to fire them or force them to clean up their act. Imprisonment is inferior to fines because prisons are costly to maintain."
Becker also recommends that young people should be exempted from the minimum wage, arguing, "These laws price unskilled youths out of jobs and so raise their unemployment rates. In turn, this unemployment encourages youths to engage in crime, especially crimes against property."
Obviously, though, there is no point in police officers becoming more efficient if criminals know that it will take years to get to trial. We therefore need more judges and magistrates and a more efficient judicial bureaucracy. The problem here seems to be mainly clerical. All judges and magistrates should have their own laptops, as well as secretaries to assist in note-taking and writing up judgments. And perhaps lawyers could be penalised on a rising scale when unprepared to conduct their cases.
It will probably cost a few hundred million dollars over five years to fund all these measures. But this is the tasty part of the medium-term plan: the money will be readily available if the PNM regime blanks Patrick Manning's new Parliament building.
In the long view, though, the most reliable predictor of a high crime rate in any society is a wide gap between the rich and the poor. Take the two largest economies in the world: the United States and Japan. In both countries, the national rates of consumption and production are about the same (i.e. both are "materialistic" societies). But in Japan, executives make only ten times what an entry level worker makes, as compared to the US where CEOs make 475 times what a factory worker makes. In Japan, nine percent of the national income goes to the poorest 20 percent of households, whereas in the US only four percent of the national income reaches the same percentage of poor households. The result: Japan has one of the lowest crime rates of any country in the world.
What this shows, though, is that it's not economic factors per se which are the real cause of crime, but cultural ones. But you can't redistribute wealth through initials (ETP or CEPEP), since these are not productive enterprises and, in the long run, do more harm than good to the poor. So the challenge is to narrow the gap between rich and poor without handcuffing the market's invisible hand.
One obvious measure for achieving this is education. The Education Ministry is implementing a School Intervention Strategies Programme which has some useful elements such as continual teacher training, setting up a pool of substitute teachers, special programmes for difficult students, and student councils. Other measures &endash; a mediation system, guidance and peer counselling, a school code of conduct, a peace promotion task force &endash; are likely to fail, because they are based on a wrong concept of human nature - i.e. that humans are blank slates shaped entirely by their environment.
Since people, and in particular young males, are predisposed to aggression, preaching the virtues of non-violence to them is a waste of breath. More effective, perhaps, would be the introduction of martial arts training in schools and communities. The idea here is that young men's aggressive tendencies would be expressed within a formal structure; it might even become a matter of pride to settle disputes in the ring with fists rather than on the street with guns or knives.
But the most important thing is to improve the basics: reading, writing, numeracy, and to develop the technical and crafts curricula. The rest will &endash; and must &endash; take care of itself.
Part of changing our educational culture, however, would be promoting intellectualism in the wider society. There are many benefits to this, but a pertinent one is that people with intellectual interests are less likely to be criminals. Jewish culture, for example, embraces scholarly values and the Black economist Thomas Sowell has noted that "Even when Jews lived in slums, they were slums with a difference: lower alcoholism, homicide, accidental death rates [and] lower juvenile delinquency rates."
In his book Darwin's Cathedral, anthropologist David Sloan Wilson writes, "Cultures are required to orchestrate human behaviour in relation to specific environments…The larger human groups become, the more culture is required to channel the emotional outpourings of our innate psychology, which was originally designed to work in small groups." And one function of culture is to bind the human group together. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate argues that literacy, history and realistic art "help people to project themselves into the lives of other people who might otherwise be mortal enemies". So a more intellectual culture can help reduce ethnic tensions (as well as the influence of damn fools).
Another long-term measure would be more investment in poor women. A 2001 World Bank report found a strong correlation between women's rights and schooling with less poverty and less official corruption. Although I suspect this effect would be felt strongly only in poor nations, I think targeting single mothers for preferential social assistance, particularly child care services, and job education would yield significant benefits.
There is a very high correlation between juvenile delinquency and single-mother families, which is probably caused by poverty and exposure to negative peer influences. But part of any such programme must include reduction of teenage pregnancies: and that means sex education, free and available contraception, legal abortions, and a more liberal attitude towards sex - in other words, less blasted hypocrisy. Needless to say, this approach would also drastically reduce the HIV-transmission rate.
All these measures are aimed at achieving a basic level of contentment for most citizens. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote, "The good life is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy. I mean that if you are happy you will be good." Democratic practice is essential for achieving this. In The Economics of Happiness, authors Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer note, "…participation RIGHTS are more important in terms of a feeling of control, self-determination, or influence in the political sphere than ACTUAL participation…fundamental social institutions do indeed systematically influence happiness."
This is why Constitutional reform, strengthening local government, and reducing Prime Ministerial power are all crucial measures for conquering crime. It is also why Patrick Manning's unilateral insistence on a new Parliament building is, in the long run, a criminal act. And, with that, I done talk.
Copyright ©2003 Kevin Baldeosingh