A wound to heal

Colin Robinson

I never wanted to write about crime. Sure, it’s the #1 citizen concern, why governments lose elections, and close to the biggest slice of successive national budgets. But every other columnist does. And I’ve always wanted to talk about things that get less attention.

But it seems I’ve talked about little else since this column began. Procedural justice. Administrative violence. Endurance trauma. Broken men whose needs Rhondell Feeles trumpets every time they kill women. Children “raised by the belt” new courts are trying to prevent becoming those men. The Beetham law student handcuffed naked by zealous police. What to do when someone’s shot on your doorstep. After the shootout in your barbershop. Not to forget the pastors who want to criminalise love, and folks who imagine only outlaws own their own bodies. And leaders like Hanif Benjamin and David Small who turn to authority and nostalgia for solutions.

Perhaps crime ought to be the focus of everything in TT. Successfully preventing crime is the surest route to political legitimacy and survival; and to leveraging guava-crop-season funding. We all ought to be jumping up in crime-fighting. Because preventing crime requires fixing so many of those other things I want to write about.

After last week’s Hilton launch, I didn’t just volunteer to join the National Crime Prevention Programme’s local Community Council. I talked to two young people who shared in that “momentous” occasion about their ideas about what prevents crime, and concrete initiatives they believe would.

“We need to change our lens,” both agreed. Crime isn’t about "wotlessness."

Crime is a wound inflicted by years of administrative violence, said 34-year-old Dr Keron King, criminologist, and father of two. He talked about violence and oppression built into our social systems, and a needed shift in policy analysis on crime to understand the “deep-rooted social inequalities and patriarchal thinking that has led to a toxic society,” acknowledging crime is a systems issue, not an individual one.

Psychologist Élysse Marcellin, 26, has started a new NGO. (Disclosure: we serve on a board together, and I sat next to her mother in primary school). MindWise Project is doing public education on mental wellness and available resources. Sustainable Minds, their UN-sponsored video series, is about to launch. Noting even the most atrocious criminals aren’t born wanting to be bandits or inherit it, she too urges the roots of crime are “multi-pronged,” pointing to “years of unhealed trauma from slavery to today” and “intersecting layers of oppression we navigate daily.”

“Until we ask the question why, we actually can’t solve anything.” People we view as criminals are in many aspects no different from us, Marcellin notes, pointing to the multiple triggers self-believing law-abiding citizens live with, who resort to violence after a bad drive, to retaliate against discrimination, defend a loved one, or harm one to silence doubts he is man enough. Some young people learn violence as a solution in abusive homes; that crime is the surest route out of poverty; or that refusing to engage in crime targets them for victimisation.

King and Marcellin shared seven solutions for preventing crime.

1.
Stop criminalising everything. We punish poor people for leaving their children at home alone or not paying maintenance, when they can’t afford otherwise. The system’s responses make the problem worse. A prison sentence easily prevents you from ever getting a job that will lift you out of poverty. Punishment often doesn’t change problem behaviour. Diversion of offenders into programmes that do makes more sense. Instead of criminalising minor, non-violent offences, speed processing of small charges, and adopt restorative approaches. Apply community sentences. Offer victims offender mediation in sexual violence cases;

2.
Improve access to mental health services. Stress is epidemic, and coping strategies poor. Support with conflict resolution and anger management are needed. Cost of private-sector services places them out of reach of many; and services in the public sector are in high demand. Train more providers; or negotiate to lower access to private care;

3.
Establish restorative justice councils at community and school levels, empowering them to resolve their own conflict restoratively (the Children’s Court uses a similar approach);

4. Make police stations proactive and victim-centred in their analysis and operation, through tertiary institution and civil society partnerships that deploy social workers, psychologists and criminologists who take a wrap-around approach to victims and the root causes of crime;

5.
Incentivise community-based after-school centres that adopt an “ecological” approach to child and youth development;

6. Formalise a prison-to-college pipeline in adult and juvenile facilities; and, of course,

7. Abolish SEA

“Crime is a wound that justice should be healing,” a Harold Pepinsky adage, sits among the scriptures in King’s e-mail footer. “Crime isn’t a war,” he stresses, urging his proposals can “start the healing.”