The power of respect

COLIN ROBINSON

caisott2@gmail.com

My Guyanese friend Candacy sends out those annoying Facebook Messenger group shares all the time. This week, instead of the usual eye-roll or sigh, for some reason one of her videos got me to click. Then to repost it. And now to talk about it with you.

The video was a 100-second clip from a 2016 TED talk by Victoria Pratt, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and former chief judge in Newark’s busy municipal court system. Pratt’s mother was a Caribbean immigrant.

It was one of those big simple ideas I talked about last week. So simple they seem stupid. Yet so absent in most of what we do.

TT struggles mightily in our policy and in our reasoning with this thing we label “lawlessness.” Our first instinct is to want more rules. Like the group of pastors turning up outside Parliament every Friday to say if Parliament allows the court to repeal some laws we haven’t enforced in decades, morality will collapse. Or we yearn for the exercise of more power and control. The culture across our institutions is to treat people with disrespect and indignity to enforce their authority.

But research has found the opposite: that people are far more likely to obey the law if the justice system does not humiliate them.

Pratt has championed this practice of “procedural justice,” which is rooted in 1970s research by Tom Tyler, and validated by considerable action research since with marginalised defendants in US courts. Pratt argues that its “principles …can be implemented as quickly as tomorrow” and “it can be done for free.”

Such ideas and practices aren’t alien to our local courts or their leaders. Similar thinking and vision ground the establishment of the new Family & Children Division—though it’s a far more costly application than the simple and powerful changes judges and magistrates could make to the court experience by simply respecting the people before them.

A few years ago, I sat and watched former Chief Magistrate Marcia Ayers-Caesar speak from the bench to a young defendant, one of a group, all under 30, arrested in Victoria Square the first night of a long weekend and charged the first workday after with loitering: “That you were in a public place and were unable to give a good account of yourself.” They’d already been humiliated by the police and press before they even got before the magistrate. Thanks to police, a headline in the newspaper trumpeted “Drag queens in court today.” That’s how I was there.

Ayers-Caesar spoke Standard English to the defendant, then sensing no response, she switched to Trinidad creole, “How much years you have?” That defendants understand what is going on is one of the pillars of “procedural justice.”

We still ban writing in the magistrates’ courts.

Another pillar of procedural justice is that court participants be given a voice. My one experience with the magistracy as a defendant was being collared by police and shoved out of the court because I dared, first to try to have an exchange with the magistrate, and then to say I thought her judgement unfair.

So much of our encounter with Caribbean justice is the latter and not the former experience—one deliberately designed to deny us dignity that leaves us seething with rage at the system.

That Candacy shared Pratt’s TED video was what gave it deeper meaning. Candacy shares a lot with the 12 young people in Ayers-Caesar’s court that day on loitering charges. In 2009, she was one of a group of nine working-class trans Guyanese women who were arrested, held in jail, charged with cross-dressing (a different one of the Caribbean’s vagrancy laws to control emancipated Africans) fined, and lectured to by their chief magistrate to give their lives to God. They sued in high court, and they got the law to say that dressing to express their identity wasn’t illegal. Still, a magistrate insisted when they had matters in his court that they appear before him in men’s clothing. So they went to the Judicial Service Commission and put an end to that.

In her TED Talk, Pratt talks of the reluctance of judges like her to embrace procedural justice out of a fear of appearing vulnerable on the bench. That insecurity with power drives so much of what we do wrong in every Caribbean institution, including the very court leaders most invested in procedural justice in the courtroom.

As a nation, we keep searching for expensive solutions to lawlessness. But perhaps it is in the “The Power of Treating People With Respect” that we will find one. And that’s not just about our courtrooms or the flagrant inhumanity of remand yard. It is at Licensing; how families and schools respect children and their bodies; how Parliamentarians respect taxpayers.

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