My Tuesday and Thursday mornings are filled with little styrofoam
cups of green tea and the half-knowing murmurs of students. I’m teaching again,
tasked with convincing young people with little exposure to the social sciences
why they should wake up first thing in the morning to hear me lecture about it—the
“intro class.” I’ve spent the last two classes proselytizing, preaching for
sociology despite my own ambivalence toward the discipline.
One of my last lectures was on the social construction of
reality, what we know and how we come to know it. I argued that knowledge
exists within a context and that this context is a product of historical
economic, social and cultural processes. Furthermore, there are those who narrate
our reality, those with greater influence on how we understand our context,
that get to speak the loudest, most frequently and with the most legitimacy. In
the Bahamian social context, these people are religious leaders, politicians
and some business people.
I ended the lecture with clench fists and the lecturer’s
boom, “Sociologists busy themselves with creating a body of knowledge that
tells us, beyond the dominant stories, how our societies really work. That is
what we do!” End scene. Class dismissed. I fall back into exhortations about
completing the readings for class and finishing assignments. But is this really
what sociologists’ do? Is this the work
of the social scientist?
If we come to know the world through a number of overlapping
stories that give meaning to the things we see and experience, then as sociologist
we have to ask who’s telling those stories, in whose interest do the dominant discourse
of who we are, where we are and what is going on operate, and how do these
stories affect the way we interact with the world around us and those that
share it with us?
We can start with the story about crime in the Bahamas. We
have come to understand crime as a kind of social phantom that is spiraling out
of control. We’ve come to believe through various proclamations by influential
people, like politicians and pastors, that these growing levels of criminal
activity are a function of decaying family structures, the absence of fathers,
the waning influence of the church, the unsustainable mixing of two
diametrically opposed cultures or the presence of “illegals,” and the
immorality of this generation of Bahamians in particular, which is fueled by
greed, covetousness, entitlement and down right laziness.
We’ve also been told that the purported solutions for stemming
the tide of crime are two things: prayer and punishment. We must pray because crime is a symptom of
moral slippage, evidence of our movement away from our Christian faith and
perhaps even evidence of the absence of God, so disappointed with our
sinfulness that he has left these blessed shores. We must punish because deviants
are no longer afraid of the law. In fact, we must return to the days of
flogging prisoners, or hanging, not only to strike fear in the hearts of would
be criminals, but also to make examples of those already incarcerated. And,
these two thoroughly Protestant solutions for putting an end to crime are so
inextricably intertwined that the Bahamas Christian Council has publicly
advocated for the return of the death penalty.
Though, if we are to really get a sense of what we should be
doing to combat crime in the Bahamas, perhaps we should try to get as clear a
picture as possible of what is causing crime. Who is the Bahamian criminal?
Where do they come from and what is their life experience? And, why do they
commit crime?
This is not a mystery; in fact faculty and students at the
College of the Bahamas have done some fantastic work to help explain the
origins of crime and criminal behavior within the Bahamian context.
According to a survey of 336 inmates done by College of the
Bahamas faculty in, “Profile
of Inmates at HM Fox Hill Prison,” the Bahamian criminal is primarily male,
with both parents born in the Bahamas, educated in the public school system having
attained between a 10th and 12th grade education. Interestingly,
48% of inmates were expelled from school mostly for fighting or bad behavior,
suggesting pre-existing disciplinary concerns. We also know that our criminals
are not just a bunch of loafs. Fifty-nine percent of inmates were actually
employed at the time of their incarceration with 45% of inmates employed for
1-5 years.
The foreshadowing of criminal activity in the disciplinary
problems of students may be a symptom of issues at home. Thirty-one percent of
inmates were abused or mistreated, 47% of them by a parent or guardian.
Carroll, Fielding, Brennen and Hutcheson argue in their paper, “Rearing
Violence in Bahamian Homes,” that children who are abused are at greater
risk of poor school performance and of arming themselves with weapons, behavior
likely learned in the home. In their
work, the authors pull together studies that, “help to paint a picture of
activities in children’s homes, and beyond, all of which shed light on the
tangled web of violence and highlight links between childhood violence and the
associated actions of children both in childhood and adulthood.”
I’m not suggesting a direct causal relationship between
criminality and the abuse visited upon children in Bahamian homes; however, as
Currie and Tekin make note, the violence children experience at the hands of
guardians disrupts the social bonds that prevent most of us from committing
crime. In fact, “maltreatment approximately doubles the probability of engaging
in many types of crime.” It is not that criminals come from single-parent
homes, as some people would argue, but that they come from abusive homes. We
are priming our children for violence and the socio-economic environment that
we jettison them into doesn’t help either.
According to research
done by Michael Stevenson, 40% of respondents indicated that economic
reasons were the motivation for their criminal activity. The second most
reported reason by inmates was association, followed by drugs and anger. The
supernatural came in fourth at 4%, followed by everything from stress and
neglect to self-defense and sex. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t pray but if
economic reasons were the primary motivation for criminal activity, perhaps we
should give that some consideration as well.
Inmates refer to experiences of
absolute-poverty—homelessness, starvation and the inability to provide for
basic needs—as well as relative depravation—the desire for material wealth and
the respect of the street. Stevenson concludes, what is clear is that
“Experiences of relative depravation, in the context of severe inequality in
the Bahamas, produces a form of economic reasoning about the cause of crime
that should be considered alongside absolute poverty as a significant cause of
crime.”
And, how severe is this economic inequality? As Alison Lowe
pointed out in the Tribune article, “The
Bahamas is Becoming Increasingly Unequally,” data is scarce, but the
Bahamas is the most unequal country in the Caribbean. From 1999 onward, in
fact, inequality has been growing in the Bahamas with 50% of expenditures
consumed by the top 20% of Bahamians while the bottom 20% of Bahamians consume
only 5% of expenditures. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, this
economic inequality, mixed with a lack of employment opportunities and the
effect of poverty on education, are key factors in rising crime rates.
This body of research suggests that we have not been radical
enough in addressing crime and that the solutions of prayer and punishment are
superficial. Family life, school life and economic conditions are the fire in
which our criminal element is forged. Unfortunately, the most influential
narratives about crime focus almost exclusively on the criminal, and if our
only public policy focus is how best to deal with people once they’ve become
criminals we’re already too late.
A comprehensive policy initiative on crime must include an
increased focus on social service programs that help to protect children from
various forms of abuse in their homes, professional and comprehensive
counseling for victims, as well as economic safety nets for families suffering
from absolute-poverty. It must move our educational system away from solely
punitive responses to misbehavior in schools, and toward rehabilitative
measures. Understanding that behavioral problems in schools are not only an
indicator for future criminality, but that it can suggest abusive home
environments, is key for altering the life paths of troubled children and
future criminals.
Lastly, we must begin to have an honest conversation about
economic inequality in this country, and that means giving the poorest among
us, those with the least power, the chance to tell their stories. This also
means deep social science research initiatives to better understand how
Bahamian society is organized socio-economically. Politicians and civil
servants cannot construct effective public policy on their own—we must give
voice to the voiceless and lead with strong empirical and qualitative data.
Prayer and punishment are the dominant narratives now, but
its time we ask who these narratives benefit. There is a group of people in
Bahamian society that benefits from looking righteous and another that benefits
from being tough on crime. Unfortunately, this does nothing for reality of our
crime situation, for the abused child who we have a chance to save, or the man
trying to provide for his family unable to understand why he hasn’t had the
same opportunities as some of those around him. Our options are this: alter our
approach or continue to reap the fruits of our shallow solutions and inaction.
Joey Gaskins is
a graduate of Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY with a BA in Politics. He was
born in Grand Bahama Island, studied at the London School of Economics
and Political Science (LSE) where he attained his MSc in Race, Ethnicity
and Post-Colonial Studies and begun a Doctoral Degree in Sociology.
Joey lives in Nassau and is a former part-time lecturer at College of
the Bahamas, restaurant owner and a principal at the communications and
policy consulting firm, The Consortium Group (www.tcgbahamas.com).
You can reach him at
joseph@tcgbahamas.com.
