The Tribune

By Rupert Missick Jr

The catalyst for his first criminal act was hunger; a raw, desperate but basic need for food.

At 13, Christopher Rolle was living on the streets of Kemp Road. His grandmother, the only person in his estimation who really took care of him was dead and his twin sister had run away a year before to escape an abusive home.

After, Christopher relied on the generosity of a friend’s mother who fed him on occasion and allowed him to bathe in her home.

That year, he was arrested and charged for burgling the former City Markets on Village Road. By then, he had already developed the habit of breaking into establishments to steal food.

Christopher is now 26 and serving a 13-year sentence for armed robbery and several charges stemming from a high-speed chase on June 2, 2011, that ended in a violent shootout with police on Chesapeake Road near Nassau Paper Company.

The incident resulted in him receiving two gunshot wounds to the leg and one in the hand.

He pleaded guilty to a litany of charges, which included endangering a police officer’s life and possession of an unlicensed firearm with the intent to endanger life before Justice Bernard Turner. He has resigned himself to serving out his time.

From the beginning, life was hard for him.

At six weeks old, his mother, finding it difficult to take care of Christopher and his twin sister (the pair being the last of nine children), gave them up to their father to raise.

The twins went to live with their father and grandmother through Strachan’s Alley off Kemp Road.

Christopher met his mother once in life, at three years old. Five years later, at eight years of age, he discovered that his mother was murdered in her home.

For any young person, attempting to pursue an education in the face of all of these challenges would be difficult enough, but his father and stepmother’s total lack of faith in his intelligence made it an impossibility.

When he approached them about paying the fees he needed to write his BJCs, they refused. The reason in their minds was simple; Christopher “was too dumb to pass”.

By the 11th grade, he had dropped out of school completely as there was no one willing or able to purchase school clothes or supplies for him.

He made a laudable attempt to attend BTVI at 16 but when a teacher told him to leave his class until he purchased a book he could not afford, he never returned.

Looking back on his attempts to obtain an education, Christopher says he sometimes wished he had better parents and “a little bit of encouragement”.

“I get mad at my father a lot because I knew if he had pushed me I would have succeeded and not ended up living a life of crime just so I don’t die from hunger,” Christopher said.

His departure from BTVI pushed him further into criminality. By age 16, he was already a low-level drug dealer and ended up spending three months in prison for assaulting a client with a cutlass over a $700 cocaine bill.

After his release and before his 18th birthday, he would serve a total of 23 months in prison for two separate incidents involving shop breaking and stealing from a vehicle.

When he came out, Christopher made another earnest attempt to go straight. He met his girlfriend and the couple had two children.

While he was working to make a decent life for his small family, another rough patch came. After the birth of their first daughter, construction work became scarce. Christopher was unemployed again and the bills and rent were still due, so he returned to his drug selling days.

While he doesn’t blame his previous stays in HMP on his current incarceration, Christopher notes that the prison system holds little hope for rehabilitation for persons such as him.

A person he says, “could go to jail for stealing, like stealing snacks or something and when they put them in prison, they have to live around murderers and the like and that makes them worse”.

“Some people are easy to persuade and when they get released the first thing they want is a gun. Then one thing leads to another,” Christopher said.

There is a lot of time for regret and retrospection inside the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison.

“The hardest thing about jail is just sitting in the cell and looking out of the bars. Sometimes when I look out, I can see a bird walking by or flying past. That bird can go where it wants to go and I can’t do what I want to do or eat what I want to eat.

“Sometimes by the time you get your food it’s cold or you can have two or three days go by without the cellblock being cleaned,” Christopher said.

Today he is unsure of what the future will hold but is convinced that if it holds anything positive it won’t be because he was rehabilitated in prison.

He sits in a cell for almost 24 hours a day. He waits on the chaplain to visit him so he can get a book or the odd newspaper to read.

He gets to go outside four times a week, sometimes for 20 minutes to half an hour at a time, but on a good day he might get to spend 45 minutes.

“They don’t really give you anything but food. They treat you like an animal. If you keep a dog locked up for 24/7 smelling their own faeces, when you let him go he is just like a wild animal,” Christopher said.