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The growth of crime in Jamaica
2008-06-01 Written by: Bernard Headley
Jamaica Herald
All countries and regions will ever so often go through spikes in the occurrence of crime. The normal nature of crime is that over extended periods, specific crimes will show “waves” or surges. But then, just as dramatically, the pattern will decline or dip in the next immediate period or periods. Rarely do we see protracted periods of one or the other: unrelenting increases or sustained downturns. That is, until we look at Jamaica and a small number of countries, also in the Caribbean.
Extraordinarily high incidences of violence, particularly homicides and police killings (of and by the police) are now steadfast, defining features of Jamaica. Frequency of homicides has not shown — certainly not over the course of the last several years — any appreciable dips from one year to the next, or from one new moon to the next. Rather, the converse has been the case: homicide and other violent crimes have been moving with regularity in only one direction — up.
Lest we take fool’s comfort in believing that it’s only our violent crimes that are going up, while property crimes are going down; the truth is: people who study crime patterns rely on homicide figures as the key measure of the pervasiveness of serious crime. We do so because homicide is the most reliably reported crime. If numbers of homicide are moving up, so too generally are all other serious crimes.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Rates vs. numbers</span>
We also find it useful when, for example, when comparing the magnitude of crime or the chance of being victimised by a crime, to discuss ratio of crime to population — the rate — as opposed to just the raw numbers. Rates of homicide in Jamaica have climbed from a low of seven or eight murders per 100,000 inhabitants (less than 100 murders) in each of the years leading up to independence, to an astounding 40 to 45 murders per 100,000 in the 1990s. And from 2005 to the end of 2007, the rate skyrocketed to close to 60 murders per 100,000 people (more than 1,500 persons murdered annually) — figures that do not include victims of police actions.
Reflect for a moment on these statistics. For every 100,000 Jamaicans alive in 1961—62, no more than eight of them stood the chance of being killed by a gunman, a gang member or “loved one”; at least 57 of them would in 2007. We can also look at it this way: the chance of exiting life in a way dictated by another human being (i.e., other than the state) has skyrocketed sevenfold since 1962.
Put still more starkly, the rate at which we murder each other has increased by more than 600 per cent in the years since self-determined nationhood. You are four times more likely to be shot, stabbed or beaten to death in Kingston or Spanish Town than you’d be in Bedford-Stuyvesant (in Brooklyn) or Barack Obama’s Southside, Chicago. You are today statistically safer from being slaughtered anywhere inside Haiti, by either the police or a gunman, than in parts of metropolitan Kingston, St. Catherine, Clarendon or St. James.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Not a police problem</span>
But our desperate crime situation is not primarily a police problem. Never was, never will be. We may have a problem with the police, with their level of efficiency and effectiveness at responding to crime, or with their conduct, style and methods of policing. Ultimately, though, the police and the security forces cannot fix for us our crime problem.
Growth in crime in Jamaica has followed, incredibly as it may seem, a logical trajectory. Notwithstanding our understandable eagerness for immediate solutions, it might still be helpful to critically remind ourselves of the path of this trajectory.
What would have been responsible in say 1955 though 1961 — 50 or so years ago — for the country’s murder rate being an unlikely seven or eight homicides per 100,000 inhabitants? And what would have changed so fundamentally to cause the figure to have climbed to a horrendous 56 or 57 last year?
<span style="font-style: italic">I offer here, briefly, two explanations, both grounded on the notion of crisis: a structural-economic crisis and crisis in values.</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold">Structural-economic crisis</span>
The structural-economic component has more to do with change in society than solely with the matter of crisis. Change is a normal and even desirable event and end product. All societies experience change, some more epoch-making than others. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century marked a grand and some would say “glorious” change in Western civilisation.
Structural change creates crises when all of its aspects and ramifications had not been anticipated, and as a result, were not sufficiently planned for or accommodated. The crisis accelerates when corresponding, and necessary, change in integrative institutions (family and educational systems, for example) either lags or degenerates.
In 1955, the Jamaican population numbered approximately 1.6 million, roughly one million less people living on the rock than there are today. We lived then, not always very happily (since sizeable numbers of our fathers had been steadily leaving for Britain), in mostly rural communities. Three-quarters of us, close to 80 per cent in fact, lived in localities (districts and towns) that numbered 5,000 people or less. Several communities across the length and breadth of the island, but particularly in the parishes of Westmoreland, St. James, St. Elizabeth, Clarendon and St. Catherine, were reasonably well sustained by the growth and harvesting on vast estates, of sugarcane; and by manufacture of sugar and related products in giant sugar factories.
A major programme of modernising the sugar industry in the 1950s, coupled with guaranteed markets at guaranteed “good” prices, saw the worth of sugar increase by 170 per cent between 1943 and 1953. Profitability in the industry, and its ability to not only generate jobs, but also to sustain whole communities, continued through 1965, when the world price for sugar took a nose-dive, from which it never recovered.
A measure of self-sufficiency had characterised the towns and districts that came under the economic sway of sugar and small-scale farming, which frequently supplemented income from sugar and added resilience to tightly-knit rural life. Informal agencies and abundance of social capital worked well to socialise and insulate; they were also effective at maintaining order and discipline, and at restraining youthful impulse. Village elders bonded and shared knowledge and expertise with the youths of the community.
But, beginning in the mid-1960s, the downward spiral in the fortunes of sugar — followed by free trade and globalisation — would erode the natural “mechanical” solidarity of village life. Jobs in manufacturing promised by the political classes of the 1950s and 1960s, to replace the displacements from sugar’s modernisation and later decline, were insufficient and short-lived.
Hordes of the displaced and the hopeful had nonetheless, by the end of the 1960s, already made their way, children in tow, into or on the outskirts of the three or four main urban centres into which the supposed new manufacturing jobs were to be found.
As Professor Don Robotham pointed out recently for Clarendon in one of his regular Sunday Gleaner contributions, this massive internal migration “led to a plethora of squatter communities”. The communities would morph, within a generation, into seething cauldrons of despair, and its people become cannon fodder in conflagrations over political “spoils and scarce benefits”. The new urban “communities” would become, in other words, crime prone — pregnant with the seeds that, from the barrios of Bogotá to the shantytowns of Johannesburg, to the “hoods” of Los Angeles, researchers have long found contributed to high rates of especially violent crime.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Crisis in values</span>
Had the violence of the last 40 years confined itself, however, to the malleable and the dispossessed crammed into gullies and behind ghetto walls, we might have been successful at crushing, or at least containing it — both the violence and the people who perpetrate it. And indeed we have tried a lot of crushing and containing. But violence in the society is a way of life; it is nurtured and sustained by the larger culture, a culture of violence. Not a “subculture”, as my friend and superb colleague, Professor Anthony Harriott, maintains; but an entire culture of violence. A subculture of violence would suggest pockets or small units of people who behave badly, and whose understandings of violence are diametrically at odds with the larger social universe they inhabit.
But is that really the situation in today’s Jamaica, where violence sells; where we deal and are taught to deal forcefully and aggressively with each other, with our differences? Even the language of the church, the rock of peace in our foundation, is often infused with the rhetoric and symbolism of violence. We are “at war” with Parliament and all those whose views (on women’s right to choose, casino gaming, protection of gays) are contrary to ours, Christian church leaders have declared.
But far more troubling is another factor; it’s the ease with which folks we once spurned for their “badmanship” have now slipped into mainstream acceptance. This makes the job of law enforcement fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams used to run the story by me that when he was a rookie cop, some 40 years ago, he learned very quickly that the “one man” he should never stop and ask to produce his documents was the man driving a Nash or Humber Hawk motor car. That’s because the men who did were of upstanding significance to and in their communities; they usually were doctors, lawyers and/or almost always Justices of the Peace (JPs).
But things have changed. The men you do not stop, much less “touch”, today, Adams bemoans, are the big men of violence (though we’ve recently seen, but still far too infrequently, a case or two of this happening). They, these men of death, command huge spheres of business and political influence. They throw lavish uptown St. Andrew parties, the invitation lists to which, if I read correctly another good UWI colleague’s work, Dr. Herbert Gayle’s, many in respectable society would kill to be on.
Stuffed briefcase in hand, multimillion-dollar SUV parked outside, and half of Africa’s gold reserves hung around their necks, these emissaries of destruction will swoop down and buy up acres of expensive real estate from an aging class of eager-to-sell one time wealthy landowners, now strapped for cash and challenged by transfer taxes. On the land, the new exemplars of how to live a good Jamaican life will erect garish marbled mansions, at the sight of which the rest of us stop and endlessly gawk.
Understanding the structural-economic change that has given rise to criminogenic environments, and of the perversion of the dominant culture, is essential “Level 1” for any Management Studies-type 21 bullet-point scheme, or “roadmap” for how we are going to tackle crime.
<span style="font-style: italic">Bernard Headley is professor of criminology, University of the West Indies, Mona and professor emeritus, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.</span>
2008-06-01 Written by: Bernard Headley
Jamaica Herald
All countries and regions will ever so often go through spikes in the occurrence of crime. The normal nature of crime is that over extended periods, specific crimes will show “waves” or surges. But then, just as dramatically, the pattern will decline or dip in the next immediate period or periods. Rarely do we see protracted periods of one or the other: unrelenting increases or sustained downturns. That is, until we look at Jamaica and a small number of countries, also in the Caribbean.
Extraordinarily high incidences of violence, particularly homicides and police killings (of and by the police) are now steadfast, defining features of Jamaica. Frequency of homicides has not shown — certainly not over the course of the last several years — any appreciable dips from one year to the next, or from one new moon to the next. Rather, the converse has been the case: homicide and other violent crimes have been moving with regularity in only one direction — up.
Lest we take fool’s comfort in believing that it’s only our violent crimes that are going up, while property crimes are going down; the truth is: people who study crime patterns rely on homicide figures as the key measure of the pervasiveness of serious crime. We do so because homicide is the most reliably reported crime. If numbers of homicide are moving up, so too generally are all other serious crimes.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Rates vs. numbers</span>
We also find it useful when, for example, when comparing the magnitude of crime or the chance of being victimised by a crime, to discuss ratio of crime to population — the rate — as opposed to just the raw numbers. Rates of homicide in Jamaica have climbed from a low of seven or eight murders per 100,000 inhabitants (less than 100 murders) in each of the years leading up to independence, to an astounding 40 to 45 murders per 100,000 in the 1990s. And from 2005 to the end of 2007, the rate skyrocketed to close to 60 murders per 100,000 people (more than 1,500 persons murdered annually) — figures that do not include victims of police actions.
Reflect for a moment on these statistics. For every 100,000 Jamaicans alive in 1961—62, no more than eight of them stood the chance of being killed by a gunman, a gang member or “loved one”; at least 57 of them would in 2007. We can also look at it this way: the chance of exiting life in a way dictated by another human being (i.e., other than the state) has skyrocketed sevenfold since 1962.
Put still more starkly, the rate at which we murder each other has increased by more than 600 per cent in the years since self-determined nationhood. You are four times more likely to be shot, stabbed or beaten to death in Kingston or Spanish Town than you’d be in Bedford-Stuyvesant (in Brooklyn) or Barack Obama’s Southside, Chicago. You are today statistically safer from being slaughtered anywhere inside Haiti, by either the police or a gunman, than in parts of metropolitan Kingston, St. Catherine, Clarendon or St. James.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Not a police problem</span>
But our desperate crime situation is not primarily a police problem. Never was, never will be. We may have a problem with the police, with their level of efficiency and effectiveness at responding to crime, or with their conduct, style and methods of policing. Ultimately, though, the police and the security forces cannot fix for us our crime problem.
Growth in crime in Jamaica has followed, incredibly as it may seem, a logical trajectory. Notwithstanding our understandable eagerness for immediate solutions, it might still be helpful to critically remind ourselves of the path of this trajectory.
What would have been responsible in say 1955 though 1961 — 50 or so years ago — for the country’s murder rate being an unlikely seven or eight homicides per 100,000 inhabitants? And what would have changed so fundamentally to cause the figure to have climbed to a horrendous 56 or 57 last year?
<span style="font-style: italic">I offer here, briefly, two explanations, both grounded on the notion of crisis: a structural-economic crisis and crisis in values.</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold">Structural-economic crisis</span>
The structural-economic component has more to do with change in society than solely with the matter of crisis. Change is a normal and even desirable event and end product. All societies experience change, some more epoch-making than others. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century marked a grand and some would say “glorious” change in Western civilisation.
Structural change creates crises when all of its aspects and ramifications had not been anticipated, and as a result, were not sufficiently planned for or accommodated. The crisis accelerates when corresponding, and necessary, change in integrative institutions (family and educational systems, for example) either lags or degenerates.
In 1955, the Jamaican population numbered approximately 1.6 million, roughly one million less people living on the rock than there are today. We lived then, not always very happily (since sizeable numbers of our fathers had been steadily leaving for Britain), in mostly rural communities. Three-quarters of us, close to 80 per cent in fact, lived in localities (districts and towns) that numbered 5,000 people or less. Several communities across the length and breadth of the island, but particularly in the parishes of Westmoreland, St. James, St. Elizabeth, Clarendon and St. Catherine, were reasonably well sustained by the growth and harvesting on vast estates, of sugarcane; and by manufacture of sugar and related products in giant sugar factories.
A major programme of modernising the sugar industry in the 1950s, coupled with guaranteed markets at guaranteed “good” prices, saw the worth of sugar increase by 170 per cent between 1943 and 1953. Profitability in the industry, and its ability to not only generate jobs, but also to sustain whole communities, continued through 1965, when the world price for sugar took a nose-dive, from which it never recovered.
A measure of self-sufficiency had characterised the towns and districts that came under the economic sway of sugar and small-scale farming, which frequently supplemented income from sugar and added resilience to tightly-knit rural life. Informal agencies and abundance of social capital worked well to socialise and insulate; they were also effective at maintaining order and discipline, and at restraining youthful impulse. Village elders bonded and shared knowledge and expertise with the youths of the community.
But, beginning in the mid-1960s, the downward spiral in the fortunes of sugar — followed by free trade and globalisation — would erode the natural “mechanical” solidarity of village life. Jobs in manufacturing promised by the political classes of the 1950s and 1960s, to replace the displacements from sugar’s modernisation and later decline, were insufficient and short-lived.
Hordes of the displaced and the hopeful had nonetheless, by the end of the 1960s, already made their way, children in tow, into or on the outskirts of the three or four main urban centres into which the supposed new manufacturing jobs were to be found.
As Professor Don Robotham pointed out recently for Clarendon in one of his regular Sunday Gleaner contributions, this massive internal migration “led to a plethora of squatter communities”. The communities would morph, within a generation, into seething cauldrons of despair, and its people become cannon fodder in conflagrations over political “spoils and scarce benefits”. The new urban “communities” would become, in other words, crime prone — pregnant with the seeds that, from the barrios of Bogotá to the shantytowns of Johannesburg, to the “hoods” of Los Angeles, researchers have long found contributed to high rates of especially violent crime.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Crisis in values</span>
Had the violence of the last 40 years confined itself, however, to the malleable and the dispossessed crammed into gullies and behind ghetto walls, we might have been successful at crushing, or at least containing it — both the violence and the people who perpetrate it. And indeed we have tried a lot of crushing and containing. But violence in the society is a way of life; it is nurtured and sustained by the larger culture, a culture of violence. Not a “subculture”, as my friend and superb colleague, Professor Anthony Harriott, maintains; but an entire culture of violence. A subculture of violence would suggest pockets or small units of people who behave badly, and whose understandings of violence are diametrically at odds with the larger social universe they inhabit.
But is that really the situation in today’s Jamaica, where violence sells; where we deal and are taught to deal forcefully and aggressively with each other, with our differences? Even the language of the church, the rock of peace in our foundation, is often infused with the rhetoric and symbolism of violence. We are “at war” with Parliament and all those whose views (on women’s right to choose, casino gaming, protection of gays) are contrary to ours, Christian church leaders have declared.
But far more troubling is another factor; it’s the ease with which folks we once spurned for their “badmanship” have now slipped into mainstream acceptance. This makes the job of law enforcement fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams used to run the story by me that when he was a rookie cop, some 40 years ago, he learned very quickly that the “one man” he should never stop and ask to produce his documents was the man driving a Nash or Humber Hawk motor car. That’s because the men who did were of upstanding significance to and in their communities; they usually were doctors, lawyers and/or almost always Justices of the Peace (JPs).
But things have changed. The men you do not stop, much less “touch”, today, Adams bemoans, are the big men of violence (though we’ve recently seen, but still far too infrequently, a case or two of this happening). They, these men of death, command huge spheres of business and political influence. They throw lavish uptown St. Andrew parties, the invitation lists to which, if I read correctly another good UWI colleague’s work, Dr. Herbert Gayle’s, many in respectable society would kill to be on.
Stuffed briefcase in hand, multimillion-dollar SUV parked outside, and half of Africa’s gold reserves hung around their necks, these emissaries of destruction will swoop down and buy up acres of expensive real estate from an aging class of eager-to-sell one time wealthy landowners, now strapped for cash and challenged by transfer taxes. On the land, the new exemplars of how to live a good Jamaican life will erect garish marbled mansions, at the sight of which the rest of us stop and endlessly gawk.
Understanding the structural-economic change that has given rise to criminogenic environments, and of the perversion of the dominant culture, is essential “Level 1” for any Management Studies-type 21 bullet-point scheme, or “roadmap” for how we are going to tackle crime.
<span style="font-style: italic">Bernard Headley is professor of criminology, University of the West Indies, Mona and professor emeritus, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.</span>
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