Injustice system promotes crime

THE EDITOR: Everyone has the answer to reducing crime in TT. From the death penalty, even extrajudicially, to others, it means building bigger prisons. Some even propose turning to religion. Still others believe we need a more significant police presence on the streets, while others claim we must better educate and instil moral values in schools.

While all these methodologies have been tried and tested over the years, none work. Is it because they are outmoded and run by those who do not understand the existential truth of this generation?

The problem makers of today – Zoomers/Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2012 – are the ones who do not have any respect for authority, whether they are parents, teachers, or the police.

Zoomers flout rules and laws with impunity and pursue lives where instant gratification is the order of the day. Furthermore, they do not believe in the mantra that hard work brings satisfying, long-lasting and life-fulfilling rewards.

How did we get to this inauspicious juncture? There is plenty of blame to go around. Absentee parents who are too busy with their lives and are focused on their jobs instead of their children. Teachers who view teaching as a job instead of a passion for passing on essential values to their charges. And politicians who set an example of verbal abuse to shame their opponents publicly.

Zoomers learn from what they hear and see on TikTok, and it is mostly outrageously raucous and expletive-laden.

Lastly, the judicial system supports a gaggle of employment, from police, lawyers, judges and jailers whose job is to send people to prison instead of fixing the problems that brought us to the brink of anarchy.

Is the answer to the spate of crimes washing over the land for the universities to churn out more lawyers, for more police officers to be hired, for the number of judges and prison officers to be increased, and for the building of bigger prisons?

Wouldn’t it be more efficacious to fix the problem from the ground up by going into the at-risk communities instead of the top-down approach we currently use?

While the legal profession could make a
prima facie case for increased employment in the judicial system, spending millions of dollars will further impoverish society and solve nothing. Suppose we do not get a handle on Zoomers now. In that case they will influence the next generation – Generation Alpha – and when that happens, society will have lost more than an entire generation.

Now that the regional symposium is over, the best the politicians of Caricom can produce is a plan of action whereby the number one priority is the “overhaul of the criminal justice system to address criminal terrorists with a focus on proactive management of prosecutions, sentencing and the diversion of young people at risk.”

How much money and workforce they proposed to use to fix the system was not addressed. If they think that “young people at risk” is the only significant issue, then the two-day symposium will undoubtedly fail to reduce crime.

Moreover, they have chosen the favoured whipping boy – the US – as the primary reason guns infiltrate the region.

No, Caricom, the problem is not the US; it is the lack of protection at our ports of entry. Did they forget that a failed state, Venezuela, is just minutes away from Trinidad?

We need to fix this ongoing problem, not by using firepower, but by using critical thinking to improve what we have ignored for years. And we can begin by admitting that what we are doing is not working and that issues that have simmered for years are now at the boiling point.

Additionally, a two-day symposium cannot fix what was left to fester for decades.

REX CHOOKOLINGO

rexchook@gmail.com