Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, speaking at the Round Table discussion at a regional crime symposium in Trinidad, said the question of crime is a complex one.
“Human behavior, and we have heard about the various manifestations of this behavior, and we have heard of root causes and what one may call proximate causes of crime, violent crime, and what is the root cause or proximate cause? You’re going to have to have timelines. The root cause is going to take clearly longer than the proximate cause of crimes. They’re more immediate than us”.
Gonsalves said in his view there is no one set of causes for crime, and different crimes have different causes, even though there may be a particular milieu, a particular source, from which the violent criminal mind springs.
Gonsalves said he does not accept what has been put forth by many sociologists, criminologists, and commentators that the causes of violent crimes reside in the economic sphere.
“I don’t accept that at all. If in fact that was the reason or the central reason, we would have had more murders and more violent crimes in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, coming all the way up when you have far more opportunities today, less poverty today, and greater wealth today than you had in the 1930s and 1940s”.
“Secondly, I don’t accept the view that people kill one another because they’re frustrated. If you are frustrated with life and living, you will kill yourself, and I note that in Trinidad and Tobago and all the countries in the Caribbean, with the possible exception of Guyana, we have among the lowest incidences and the lowest rate per thousand persons for suicide. So if you are really frustrated, we should be killing ourselves more individually, committing suicide. We don’t kill other people”.
Why are we killing other people?
To this, Gonsalves said there are lots of different answers, but the factual situations that we observe are that most crimes, most serious crimes, and most violent crimes are committed by young males overwhelmingly.
“Most of those persons, those young males who commit homicide, come from broken homes or dysfunctional homes. Most of these young males, overwhelmingly, who commit crimes drop out of school or fail to take advantage of opportunities available to them. Most of these persons, these young males who commit violent crimes, find themselves in a culture of crime, in particular communities, and form associational criminal groups or gangs”.
“These young males overwhelmingly who go to commit serious crimes, violent crimes, it is nobody’s responsibility primarily other than their own. I’ve never heard anybody enter a plea in court for murder and say that their defense is that they were frustrated or that they come from a poor home. I’ve never heard that you are responsible, and we tend nowadays when somebody kills another, to say that the society is the community they come from”.
“The fact of the matter is that they are a small minority in the disadvantaged communities from which they come. Most of them have overwhelmingly chosen the life of crime; let us not get away from that. They have chosen to be murderers. They have chosen to kill, and they do so, by and large, because they want to make some easy money. They in drugs. They running in crime. Some of them, in order to maintain their ranks in the community, develop a fascination with guns. They associate with young women, in some cases very beautiful young women, who are high maintenance, and they have to rob, steal, kill, and deal with drugs in order to maintain them. Everybody here knows what I’m talking about; here is the absolute truth. Everybody knows it, and we have to speak these things very honestly and straightforwardly”.
“These young males who commit these violent crimes are cowards. They are greedy, and they have an insatiable appetite. They are in a permanent condition of dissatisfaction, which is insatiable. I’m not saying that can’t be corrected. I’m not saying there can be no correction, but they are absorbed by me, me, me. It’s an individualism that has grown in our society as a whole, and the material base for it is dog-eat-dog capitalism. They see lots of people getting away with all sorts of things, and they decide that they’re going to try and get away with it, too”.
“On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of young males are taking advantage of the opportunities available there: going to school, people learning a trade they get in a profession. You look at the courts, those who are in the Boy Scouts, the Cadet Corps, play steel band, play football, play cricket, get involved in community activities, go to church, all of these various things, and you hardly see any of them in front of the magistrate or the judge”.
“These are the facts that are before us. I have no doubt that a significant number of them have some mental problems, as my brother Terrence Drew spoke to, but they have opportunities, but somehow in the families, in these dysfunctional families, broken families, the father is not around and the mother is hustling, trying to make a living, and when the boy is 14 years old and she can no longer control him, she says it is a Rowley or Ralph problem. Well, he’s not our problem. It’s only all of us”.
“And therefore the family that came before the state. The schools that PM Roosevelt talk about are the churches. If they stop trying to frighten us into going to heaven because of hell, because every time I go to church, they want me to go to heaven by frightening me not to go to hell, they have to begin to preach better in order to get my attention, and if they can’t get my attention in that way, how are they going to get young people’s attention? Then there are the community groups and all these things, all these various interventions, because the bulk of young males are making us very proud, but the media knows that as soon as there is one murder, it is on the front page and they talk about it, but the thousands of young people who do well don’t get that kind of coverage. If you get the coverage, you get it on page 40, continued on page 48, and you know how that goes”, Gonsalves said.
