As we cry afresh with the families of the six young women who perished a year ago in the Campus Trendz fire, whose shocking intensity still reverberates across this country, some of us would have heard the first word on local crime, on this soil, from our new Chief Justice at Government House last Thursday.
In response to a reporter’s question on the current crime wave that has averaged about one death per week since the gruesome double murder that struck the Chaderton family last month, Chief Justice Marston Gibson said in essence that the violence in Barbados today was bound up in issues beyond the realm of the law courts.
Coming from a veteran dispenser of justice, this was instructive. For society becomes emotional and cries out for the return of the hangman’s noose whenever life is lost in a vicious manner, but as soon as news unfolds of the perpetrators’ background, society’s tune changes from being highly punitive to sympathetic.
And the reason for this change is precisely rooted in those “issues” beyond the realm of jurisprudence: issues such as the criminal’s “hard life” growing up in the typical Barbadian district where few children go to sleep hungry and where breadfruit grows in abundance; or the fact that the criminal did not succeed academically in a Barbadian school curriculum that is one of the most varied and well rounded in the region; or that the criminal was reared by a single parent as nearly every other Barbadian, including our sole surviving National Hero and many other stalwarts among us.
This society gets all sympathetic when we suddenly realize that the criminal grew up among 11 siblings – like one in every ten Barbadian adults – and therefore didn’t get requisite care and attention.
Our hearts bleed when we realize that the criminal lost his mother early or lost both parents to AIDS, was physically or sexually abused, had relatives who abused drugs, did not get the opportunity to attend Sunday School, or had to make do with tea and bakes on mornings instead of cornflakes.
Sounds familiar? That’s because it is little more than items from the list of excuses for failure in a society and a world which has produced heroes and upstanding citizens from the very same abovementioned backgrounds.
But having thrown these horrid “realities” into the public eye after every murder, we gradually and unwittingly forget the victims, who did nothing to deserve brutal pain, trauma and death; who may have faced the same hardship as the criminal, who often had tougher childhood issues but who made something worthy of their lives instead of seeking to rob, maim and kill other people.
So maybe, like the Chief Justice has wisely hinted, this society needs to put more programmes in place to prevent crime; and I’m all for it.
The Barbados Youth Service has kept youths off the streets, while several community and Christian-based programmes have turned around many an errant individual. And before the “cultural industries” became a Bajan buzzword, a number of people were calling for the Empire Theatre to be repaired and used to host talent workshops and other fora to keep idle young people occupied.
There is certainly room for more ideas in crime prevention, but even in countries with far greater resources to fund such developmental programmes, crime continues unabated and criminals emerge just as rapidly from the homes of the opulent as from the heart of the ghetto.
So punishment must be a societal factor at the end of the day. Do we resume hanging, then?
Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite cautioned just after the September 3, 2010 incident that Barbados shouldn’t let itself be pressured into making a hasty decision on whether or not to resume hangings, since in a number of cases the courts might have “gotten it wrong” in delivering guilty verdicts for murder.
“We shouldn’t rush to exact that ultimate penalty unless we are sure,” he added.
Last week, he also revealed that his personal view was that Barbados should not have a mandatory death penalty, since “all the murders are not the same”.
So do we adopt similar legislation to the United States, from whence our Chief Justice has just arrived? Should we categorize our murders, with aggravated murder being punishable by death and felony murder possibly earning the convicted person life imprisonment?
Or do we continue to comfort ourselves in the fact that hanging has not proven to be a solution?
Not hanging is even less of a deterrent.
