Contending that there is an overreliance on law enforcement in preventing crime in the region, Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice and Security at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies Professor Corin Bailey says the high number of incarcerated people shows there is a failure at the policy level.
Delivering the feature address at the opening of a crime prevention symposium at the Sagicor School of Business on Wednesday, he pointed out that crime continues to increase in Barbados and several other Caribbean islands, some of which have the world’s highest incarceration rates per capita.
“Caribbean countries figure prominently among the countries with the highest rates of incarceration per capita – St Kitts & Nevis 10th; Grenada 11th; Bahamas 13th; Barbados 29th – yet crime continues to rise while what we are doing at the level of policy is not working as intended to,” Bailey said.
Pointing to the Barbados situation, he said a 2016 Inter-American Development Bank-funded study found an obvious deficit in secondary crime prevention measures, which are programmes that intervene in the early stages of violence to prevent the situation from accelerating.
“Although there was some attention paid to primary prevention – those that aim to prevent a crime or violent act from happening in the first place – it was focused on individual characteristics, with little attention paid to community or situational factors. So, in other words, crime prevention efforts were not evidence-based. More specifically, they were not targeted based on assessment of risk,” the university professor added.
He insisted that there can be no effective crime prevention without first identifying the groups and communities most at risk and targeting the elements of that risk.
Noting that crime is a complicated, multifaceted issue that requires solutions that reflect that, he pointed to his own 2016-2019 research, Survey of Individuals Deprived of Liberty which showed the correlation between criminal involvement and a low education level and history of family violence.
He pointed out that in a survey of incarcerated individuals within six countries – The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago – the majority of the respondents indicated they had not completed secondary school.
“We have to have hard conversations with ourselves in the region about what equity in our education systems looks like. Because all schools are not equal,” he said.
Speaking on the exposure to violence in homes, the academic stated this was one of the strongest predictors of the use of violence and delinquent behaviour.
“Children are forced to develop defensive responses which are manifested in the carrying of weapons or constant fighting. They begin to believe that such is the threatening nature of their environment, that they have no choice but to behave violently or to carry a weapon,” Professor Bailey added.
(JB)
Read our ePaper. Fast. Factual. Free.
Sign up and stay up to date with Barbados' FREE latest news.
Barbados Today firmly discourages any commentary or statements that are libelous, disruptive in nature or incites others to violate our Terms of Use. Any submissions made on our comment section, are solely the views of the individual and not Barbados Today.