Acting High Court Judge Laurie-Ann Smith–Bovell has been applauded for introducing the Court Positive Youth Intervention Programme (CPYIP), at the District “F” Magistrates Court to stop young people from going down the wrong path in life.
Today, members of the Berea Seventh Day Adventist Church, St Elizabeth Village, St Joseph presented Smith-Bovell with an award of appreciation for uplifting and empowering the youth in the community to change from deviant behaviour when she sat as Magistrate of the Horse Hill St Joseph based court.
Speaking to members of the media following the presentation, which took place during a thanksgiving tribute, Smith-Bovell, who became an acting Judge in October 2019, said she was pleased to have received the award and tokens of appreciation.
She said the programme would not have been successful if members of the community did not play a critical role in ensuring it worked.
Smith-Bovell outlined that one aspect of the programme involved setting bail conditions to compel deviant young people to learn a skill or engage in other productive activities, instead of returning to the block and getting themselves involved in criminal activities again.
“Let’s say you were charged with theft and your bail conditions have you doing something positive. Let’s say at the end of your case you are found guilty, obviously having invested the last six months in getting you to do something positive, you are not going to prison, you are going to use that skill to go and find a job. So, you are put on probation with certain conditions and hopefully we stop recidivism that happens among young people,” she said.
“We have people within the community who have skills, like construction workers to bring them on and teach them skills like tiling, masonry, carpentry. We have a young man who teaches them auto mechanic. We have a lady in the community who teaches them dressmaking,” she added.
The acting Judge explained that the programme, which started in 2017, was formalised in January this year. She said when she last checked, 12 people were involved in the programme and three did not comply.
“Part of that non-compliance I think was probably because of socialization. A programme like this needs parental support and community support. So, if your household is not supporting what you are trying to achieve it is very difficult.
“But I had a young man who went on to represent Barbados at water polo. I have a young man, the route he was on he was hell-bent for prison, but he is now working. I have a young man who was giving trouble at school and when we found the root of the problem [it] was something as simple as hunger.
“We put things in place so he could get a proper meal, he was dropped to school. We had another young man whose issue was something as simple as clothing, and we remedied that problem,” Smith- Bovell explained.
Attorney General and Member of Parliament for St Joseph Dale Marshall said it was heartening to see that Smith-Bovell went above and beyond her responsibilities as a Magistrate to improve lives.
“People always make the assumption that rural communities are nice and tranquil but in recent years we have been seeing a lot of that change and a lot of the sub-cultures that have been prevalent through the years are no further away than a bus ride to Bathsheba.
“But the Judge has to be complimented because she could have just come to work at 9 am, heard cases and gone long home, but she deserves all the credit in the world for recognizing that she could add to the job that she is doing by reaching out into our communities and get those young people to stay on the right path,” Marshall said.
Samuel Hackett, security for the Magistrate at District “F” and also a member of Berea SDA, plays a critical role in the programme through organising meetings between parents, the Magistrate and the deviant youth.
Hackett, who noted that Berea provided counseling for those young people, said he believed Barbados would become a better place if other courts and churches adopted the programme.
“It isn’t only for this St Joseph district alone. Any person that comes into the court setting at District F, Boarded Hall Magistrates’ Court, what I do is I talk to the parents and try to get the young people involved in whatever programme we can get them involved in.
“I go back to the Magistrate and I would say to her that ‘I would like this person involved in community service’ and she would put it in place and it works,” Hackett said. (AH)
