The Tribune

AROUND the world, governments, driven by the politics and exigencies of the moment, often respond with immediate or short-term measures designed to appease a public outcry and media reports demanding action on a given public policy issue.

Creating workable or credible public policy is a difficult or complex task even in the best of or more placid times. Policy needs to be constructed on a foundation of proper research and as comprehensive analysis as possible. Neither of the aforementioned is an easy task, and sometimes both remain unrealized.

Policymakers often have to make decisions based on seemingly conflicting information and advice. Raw information is one thing. Such data has to be analyzed. Then judgements, based on differing values, have to be rendered.

In The Bahamas, it is often difficult to get adequate data. Go to certain international websites and look for data on the country. One often finds the note: not available. We do not have the best culture of data collection or analysis. It is often seen as unimportant.

Despite its statistical gaps, the Royal Bahamas Police Force has a better culture of data collection than many government entities.

Policy-making is often quite involved because parliamentarians and cabinet members have a diversity of viewpoints based on an array of values, temperaments, life experience, religious backgrounds, education, familiarity with an issue, etc. This is sometimes a good thing, allowing for multiple views.

There are also competing stakeholders and interested parties whose views must be considered. Such input is sometimes more based on self-interest than the common good.

Take for example the implementation of a minimum wage. There are varied ideological positions and economic considerations that go into deciding the policy and politics of a wage increase.

During the COVID-19 pandemic there were raging debates and conflicts on which measures to use to address the contagion.

Clearly, there is a need to review the decisions that were made globally. But the breezy hindsight that does not take into account the realities, fears and limited knowledge of the trajectory of the virus in the moment, is simplistic and unconvincing.

When one listens to talk radio or visits certain social media chat groups, it is amusing and amazing to listen to the often harebrained, simplistic and unrealistic suggestions by some as to how governments should respond to a certain issue.

There are often policy suggestions that are ridiculous, or based on faulty information or no information at all.

But even if policymakers have reasonably good analysis and information, getting the bureaucracy to implement a policy, is often like redirecting the proverbial aircraft carrier speeding in one direction but now requiring new instructions and a change of course.

The often glacial, sometimes indifferent, chaotic and unresponsive bureaucracy that constitutes much of the Bahama public service is sometimes a study in inertia and incompetence.

One American president was asked about the power of the presidency. His retort was that he was able to get things done – after the fifth time asking. One imagines a similar reality here at home.

Public officers at multiple levels can continuously frustrate the implementation of a given policy because they may not agree with it or they are lethargic or a combination of reasons. Just because a minister or permanent secretary issues a directive does means that something will be done in a timely or effective manner.

Our government and policy culture affects our responses or non-responses to crime and violence. There may be an extraordinary dearth of knowledge and lack of understanding about the culture of violence in The Bahamas.

With another deadly frenzy of violence and killings, there is a rush of mostly unhelpful ideas from some quarters on crime. There is the ritual calling for more hangings and longer prison sentences, neither of which has repeatedly been shown to be a credible deterrence strategy.

Those who are now engaged in killing do not believe that the state is credible in trying them in a timely manner.

As noted before, responses to crime and its causes are multiple and at times complex. But there are often clear responses that have proven excessively difficult for our overburdened, often terribly incompetent and frustrating criminal justice system, inclusive of the police, the Office of the Attorney General and the courts.

One response would be, at long last, establishing the National Forensics Laboratory with the necessary technology and personnel. Such a lab could speed some trials and reduce the need to send certain tests and samples overseas, often delaying detection and prosecution.

The Laboratory is a prime example of governmental inertia. It has been known for umpteen years that such a facility is needed. Yet, successive governments have failed to fund the Laboratory despite repeated recommendations.

Intelligence gathering, good policing, various crime detection technologies, youth programmes and other measures are critical in preventing, disrupting and addressing the behaviour of gangs and criminals.

But when many individuals perceive, many times correctly, that their trials will not be heard in a timely manner and that they will be granted bail in due course, they scoff at the justice system, creating a wider ripple and sociological effect and mindset of lawlessness and contempt for authority at all levels.

We have lost much of the plot in our criminal justice system. Parents and teachers who deal with discipline can attest to author Mark Kleiman’s claim: timeliness and certainty of punishment often tend to be more effective than severity.

Alec MacGillis echoes Kleiman: “When the speed of repercussions drops, society loses a key deterrent against unlawful behaviour.”

Kleiman, who utilized insights from psychology, behavioral economics and organizational analysis, also appreciated the need for timely intervention through probationary, parole and other measures, including drug and alcohol treatment.

He once said in an interview with The New York Times: “When politicians say, ‘Let’s hire 5,000 more police!’ everybody cheers. Say, ‘Let’s hire 5,000 probation officers and create cost-effective alternatives to prison!’ and everybody yawns.”

Further, despite some progress, one area of potential crime prevention that we have failed to understand and comprehensively fund is prison reform and the redirection and rehabilitation of offenders.

In his book, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, written in 1997, psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan, who once directed the Centre for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School, wrote of some of the offenders he worked with in prison:

“Some have told me that they feel like robots or zombies, that they feel their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords. One inmate told me that he feels like ‘food decomposing.’”

“Gilligan was brought in as the medical director of the Massachusetts prison mental hospital in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, because of the high suicide and murder rates within their prisons. When he left ten years later the rates of both had dropped to nearly zero.”

We live in a highly retributive and fundamentalist society. Many of us are harsh in our views when it comes to beating and berating children. We believe that prisoners should be incarcerated in crude and merciless circumstances, and that they are in prison almost solely for punishment.

Dr Gilligan describes prisons as a “universe of violence”. If the Corrections Center in Fox Hill is similarly a “universe of violence”, we are failing miserably in lessening the capacity for violence and criminality in those who will eventually be released.

Being tough on crime is not the same as dehumanising or brutalising offenders. If we want to reduce criminal violence it is imperative that we at long last become serious about reforming and humanising our prison system.

Our general failure to do so over many decades has contributed considerably to the whirlwind of violence we continue to reap even as we remain puzzled and shocked by a failure for which we share collective responsibility as a government and a citizenry.