The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

No matter the level of temptation, and the loud demagoguery that inevitably follows a rash of murders in the Bahamas, now is not the time to move backwards and start talking about public flogging and the death penalty.

While its merits as a deterrent are highly dubious, it is simply the case that the world increasingly sees the death penalty as an aberration.

But my biggest problem with the death penalty is that when it comes up in the context of a crime wave in the Bahamas, it is a red herring and a diversion of valuable thought and energy from the real issues.

It should be clear by now that our crime problem does not originate with some breed of specialist murderers (like serial murderers) among us, but rather it originates with the horrendous commonness of acts of violence and dishonestly, which have come to be seen as normal among a whole segment of our population. Murder is merely a culmination of a generally violent and thieving culture that has been allowed to develop and thrive.

To focus on the death penalty, which only affects murders, is therefore to focus on the tip and ignore the iceberg.

When we start talking about the death penalty or public flogging, I fear we lose focus and context and begin to wander into the false comfort-zone that somehow the Bahamas we remember, the Bahamas of people like ‘us’ is being overtaken by monsters for reasons so deep that they require resolution on some deep social or psychological level, such as can only be cleansed by the horror of the noose.

This is a false and damaging picture. While I agree that we need a more generally interventionist policy in the socialisation of the most vulnerable groups, in reality, the causes of the recently horrendous murder rate relative to just ten years ago are not to be found in the longer term complaints we so often hear about “this generation”.

As long as I can remember, idle young men have fought and engaged in rivalries; as long as I can remember Bahamians have always been too prone to violence (which is obviously a result of the prevalence of beating as a discipline for children). We have also, since the 1970s also had too high a rate of murder and armed robbery for our population size.

And sociologically little has changed in The Bahamas, other than some surprisingly positive demographic trends. Contrary to common wisdom, teenage pregnancies in The Bahamas have fallen consistently and impressively over the last generation. In 1977, there were 1,001 teenage pregnancies or 21 per cent of total births. In 2007, there were a total 610 teen pregnancies or 11.9 per cent. Today the figure is around nine per cent and shrinking annually. So this talk about “children having children” as a cause for this crime wave (while still in that even 1 per cent is too many) is, statistically speaking, nonsense.

While illegitimacy and single parenthood have remained around the same (comparable to the US, and far below Black America), the “underclass” as a proportion of the population has shrunk and the middle class grown dramatically. In 1970, the constituencies of Bain Town, Grants Town and Centreville had far larger resident populations, while now very established places like San Souci, Eastwood, Tropical Gardens, Winton, Vista Marina, Colony Village and Westridge either did not exist or were the enclaves of a small elite, often usually foreign.

Today, a majority of the residents of these latter communities were born (or their parents born) in the former.
In the Bahamas, as elsewhere, boredom and a lack of father figures have long resulted in young men grouping themselves into “gangs” for protection and validation. This was true in a loose sense in the 1970s, but by the 1990s it was probably even more prevalent than it is now.

But neither does this explain why we have gone from an average of 50 or so murders a year to 120 in a decade.
Rather, what has changed so dramatically in recent years are two things that have relatively mundane causes and relatively easy solutions – the incredible abundance and easy availability of guns (which are now available for less than $200 on the street) and a court system that has degenerated into absurdity on the issue of bail for violent offenders.

Last week, on ZNS news, a senior police officer observed that some 70 per cent of last year’s murders involved a person out on bail, either as suspect or victim. This alarming statistic demonstrates just how easily we could dramatically reduce the number of murders now taking place. But the fact that it gets so little focused attention is a testament to the failures of opinion makers, most notably in the press, who seem to prefer more sensational discussions, such as over the death penalty.

Also last week, yet another young man who was convicted of having an illegal firearm (which even in softy Britain would bring a mandatory five year sentence, and in tourist places like Cayman and Bermuda, a ten- year minimum sentence) was the beneficiary of the leniency of our courts. Originally sentenced to the pathetically lenient four year minimum introduced in 2012, he successfully appealed the sentence and, appearing before the same Magistrate, was given 14 months instead, because, as the Magistrate said, she had to take a “zero tolerance” approach. The man had this gun at the end of 2012. On Tuesday, January 14th, 2014, this man will be set free to again move among us. That frightening and utterly demonstrative story appeared on the third page of the Guardian, with a tiny headline. On the front page, a story about some preacher spouting off about the death penalty will be set free to again move among us.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

January 13, 2014.