Problem of politicising crime

DEBBIE JACOB

IN 2010, WHEN I desperately searched for an excuse to back out of teaching at the Youth Training Centre (YTC), I spoke to Sgt Roger Alexander, now the Minister of Homeland Security.

I knew my teenage students, who had been incarcerated for violent armed robbery and murder, desperately wanted to turn their lives around. An overwhelming fear of letting them down had me in a panic.

I wrote about those experiences with that first CXC English language class in newspaper columns and in a book, Wishing for Wings. On page 39 of the chapter entitled Living with Fear, I wrote, “While fumbling for a reason to quit, I called Sgt Roger Alexander. I had known him for getting back my stolen dog. ‘I don’t know if I should go on teaching these boys,’ I said to Alexander, hoping he’d give me a way out. ‘Nah,’ Alexander said emphatically, ‘keep going. It’s a good thing. They’re boys. They can change. Education is important.’”

It was good advice. Education helped my students, but what mattered too was for the first time in their lives, many of those teenagers felt someone cared about them. Some came from good homes with caring parents, but usually only a mother. That was never enough. They needed strong, positive male role models and acceptance from society.

Those needs prove hard to meet in the culture of poverty. I’m sure Minister Alexander knows that from the work he did down in the trenches as a police officer. This is why the minister’s current position of wanting young offenders to be tried as adults baffles me.

He says their actions and intent, the crimes they commit, reflect adult-level decision-making, but teenagers and young men I taught in YTC or Port of Spain (PoS) Prison always claimed the opposite. They regretted their impulsivity and immaturity.

Alexander has pointed out the growing number of offences being committed by minors, but the problem has been out of hand for some time.

Even before I worked in prisons, I noted how many arrests included at least one minor in a group of men in their 20s and 30s. The problem is more than children doing crime; it’s also about the adults who lead them into crime. Desperate youth with a need for acceptance often have a fierce sense of loyalty to anyone who will accept them.

What are we doing about that in our education system? How are we teaching young men to think before acting, to make wise choices, to avoid trouble and bad company or to get a skill or education for life?

When I moved to PoS Prison to teach, I often had young men whom I had first taught in my YTC classes. They had been transferred to PoS Prison after their trials. Normally, judges would send them to Maximum Security Prison (MSP) but if they asked to be in my programmes, judges would oblige.

The prison system tried keeping them apart from inmates who had entered the system as adults, but that could never be totally possible. It was worrisome.

There is no study or real-life experience that says treating children as adults is a good idea or that this deters crime by minors. Criminologist Darius Figuera said trying minors as adults in the court of law would leave them scarred for life.

What disappoints me the most is that decisions made about crime and minors are political. We politicise crime in all the wrong ways, jump on the bandwagon of cracking down on criminals, support police shootings until good sense prevails and we realise things are getting out of hand.

This does not mitigate the bitterness people feel or solve our problems with crime. Instead, it takes our minds off of doing the hard work of creating social reform and educational structures to deal with the problem.

I assume the police believe in reform on some level or they wouldn’t have community policing and youth clubs. Yes, we get that there are some criminals who are unreachable, but we should know many are redeemable.

When we weaponise anger, fear and frustration, we dig ourselves into a deeper hole of inaction. The end result of policing, which is arresting people or shooting them during police exercises, is not action; it’s a reaction.

Crime is the end result of a long list of social and educational issues. We need to be better at recognising that and dealing with it. Instead of going forward with the idea of trying youth as adults, let’s go back to the drawing board and deal with our failure as a society.