Against all the experiential truth of the Guyanese public, the Public Security Ministry and the PNC-led Governmental propaganda apparatus insist that their “statistics” show that “serious” crime is actually decreasing. It is clear that this Government, which boasts about their “expertise” in security matters because of the number of armed forces personnel in their ranks, do not have a credible anti-crime strategy. By following the foreign- funded foreign experts’ studies and recommendations on “security,” they have lost the forest for the trees. The newly boosted army and newly formed Peoples’ Militia are not crime fighting units. Even the Police SWAT team has been mothballed.
However, “crime fighting” via direct confrontation with the criminals is but one approach – albeit the default stance of most citizens. With the development of modern society in the nineteenth century, there was an upsurge in behaviour that was defined as “criminal” with the dissolution of the societal norms in the movement from status to contract. Police Forces were formed, and jails expanded exponentially to incarcerate offenders against the criminal laws. In Guyana, our Police Force was launched a decade after the London Metropolitan Force, and this approach has dominated the discourse on “crime reduction” until the latter part of the 20th century, when sociological and psychological theories proposed interventions in both the focus on apprehension and incarceration of criminals.
This approach, in direct conflict with the “tough on crime” approach, was proffered once again only recently: that the Government go to the “roots” of crime, which are supposed to emanate from societal factors, such as poverty. In this case, the individual who had earlier supported the call for direct “oil payments” to Guyanese reiterated that call. With money in their hands, the criminals who preyed on others presumably would obdurately turn their faces away from the life of crime.
There are no studies that directly prove such a causal link between poverty and criminal proclivities, but stochastic data does suggest a correlation. There is direct evidence, however, that there are poor communities right here in Guyana that do not engage in violent crimes to secure wealth, and this undercuts the “poverty argument”, but this inconvenient fact seems to always escape the notice of those who want to throw money at the crime problem. Then there is also the fact that even when known criminals – such as the recently-apprehended Guyanese drug smuggler in Jamaica – acquire enormous wealth, they still continue in their lives of crime.
Like with most human behaviour, there is no monocausal explanation for criminal behaviour of humans, but there is general acceptance that it is not genetically linked – save perhaps for some sociopaths. So, bereft of the explanatory recourse to “nature”, we are left with the omnibus term “nurture”, which covers so many institutions in society, especially the family and the schools. Families transmit behavioural traits to children by encouraging or discouraging particular values which are prevalent in their culture, and this is where governments have failed to make meaningful inroads in discouraging negative “values”.
While crime can occur in all neighbourhoods, in some it is an outlier occurrence, while in others it is endemic. No Government, unfortunately, has had the intestinal fortitude to analyse the prevalent social mores that are operating in specific communities, so that interventions can be customised at this level rather than throwing money handouts at the culprits. The secret of reducing crime at the most cost-effective social intervention has been shown to be the creation of well-paying jobs that can engage especially young men and women in the “high-crime” producing areas. Simply doling out money to this group will do absolutely nothing to deter them from a life of crime. When people earn their money, they will begin to value it.
It is our contention that there needs to be a combination of the traditional crime- fighting techniques through professionalisation of the Police Force and directed social interventions to change cultural mores that do not stop criminal behaviour, but may actually further it.
