By: Staff writer
December 18, 2020
“Incarceration does not appear to significantly reduce criminality,” as jails are filled with non-violent offenders in the Caribbean, a recent Inter-American Development Bank study indicates.
The IDB Report, titled, “Survey of Individuals Deprived of Liberty: Caribbean 2016–2019” studied six countries in the Caribbean, The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago, and out of these six countries only one of them, Jamaica, had less than 10 percent of their prison population locked up for non-violent crime and drug related crime.
The report also said that those six Caribbean countries had high recidivism rates compared to Latin American countries where, “41 percent of inmates surveyed in the six countries of the study were recidivists or repeat offenders compared to 33 percent of Latin American prison populations.”
The report also highlighted that the Caribbean had a higher than global average homicide rate as 16 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants compared with six globally as per the United Nations Office on drugs and Crime report in their 2013 statistics.
The Report also startling said that: “non – convicted persons account for a sizeable portion of the prison population. Approximately 50 percent or more of the total prison population in three of the six countries surveyed, and between 23 and 42 percent of the population in the remaining countries, is comprised of persons who have not been convicted; many of whom are first – time offenders and/or committed non – violent offenses. Sur- vey findings suggest that inmates on remand are housed in worse conditions, experience higher levels of violence, and participate less in social reintegration activities.”
The Caribbean has slid into the dark ages on crime and punishment. Most of the elitist thinking has been set on outsmarting the Privy Council in London on re-establishing capital punishment, which has failed in every try in the last 20 years, citing the procedure as cruel and unusual punishment for offenders. However, little emphasis has been placed on employing strategies that increase re-introduction into the society as the IDB Report also highlights.
One thing the IDB said Caribbean countries can do is focus on rehabilitation as it noted, “In aggregate terms, 41 percent of inmates surveyed in the six Caribbean countries were recidivists compared to 33 percent in aggregate in the prison populations of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru.” This is surprising, because when you associate backward countries on social justice and least sensitive programmes to re-integrate offenders into society, you would think of conventionally known violent countries like Brazil or Honduras or MS-13 central, El Salvador. But no, it is the Caribbean that has the problem with development it appears.
The IDB also goes on to cite that: “Roughly 40 percent of prisoners that recidivated were imprisoned within a year of their release. In Guyana, Barbados, Suriname, and The Bahamas, roughly a quarter lost their freedom again in less than six months. These stark findings are cause for concern, making clear that the prison system fails to rehabilitate many offenders or ensure their successful re-entry into society.”
Work programmes as well as prison study programmes help to reduce this recidivism rate, even the Bureau of Prisons in the United States have noted that for them preparation for re-entry into society must begin at the start of the offenders prison sentence as a way to get them prepared for the outside world when they leave. The BOP said it is important to focus on the offenders “criminogenic” needs rather than leaving him to his own mental and physiological devices.
The BOP also noted that their research has shown that recidivism risk can be effectively reduced through evidence-based programming that targets criminogenic needs, such as courses in cognitive behavioural therapy and other topics. This means that Caribbean countries should be looking into delving deeper into mental health issues within their populations as well, something that has long since been dismissed as not an issue and laughed at when tried to be brought up in serious conversations.
Where does the Caribbean go? It’s once conventional tool in its arsenal, capital punishment, will probably not be employed again unless all countries move away from the Privy Council and towards the Caribbean Court of Justice and even then who is to say what will influence the thinking on the CCJ’s jurisprudence on capital punishment. By all means they may take a PC approach to it and uphold the PC, something that Caribbean leaders hope will not happen as it is to the understanding that the CCJ’s influential push is fuelled by the need of many at the time to re-establish the legal right many of them feel they need to capital punishment.
However, as the IDB highlighted to some degree, the region is sinking deeper and deeper into incivility and more jail is not the answer. More importantly the report said that countries should take into consideration several key initiatives, including establishing programs to divert people who have committed non-serious offenses, reforming judicial procedures and strengthening pre- and post-release services, among others.
