With all due respect to Prof Ryan's report, the causes of crime are no mystery. They have been widely known for decades, and steadfastly ignored, for reasons I'll examine in a later article. The obvious chain of causation goes like this:
1. Parenting. Morgan Job, whose capacities are tragically wasted in our wasteland, was, in the late 1980s, warning of the consequences of 13-year-olds being impregnated, and the laissez faire breeding culture among the urban underclass. The society averted its eyes, and refuses even today to accept responsibility, or even contemplate where those children, who would be 20-something now, went.
Neither does society consider that the brutality of crime might be a consequence of the sanctimonious hypocrisy that lets thousands of children suffer for decades.
2. The Junior Sec system, and the school system generally. In 1995, ALTA and UWI did independent surveys and found that literacy was below 50 per cent. Less than half the population was (and remains) unable to read a newspaper. It's axiomatic that illiteracy breeds crime, but the story doesn't end there.
The institution that made the transition from illiteracy to crime a fait accompli was the Junior Sec system (which schools have since been re-named and de-shifted, but remain unchanged otherwise). Here is the reality of Trinidad. Academic studies and anecdotal evidence suggest former Junior Secs are incubators for crime, and theatres of the effects of dysfunctional communities and parenting.
Gangs, violence against teachers, rampant sex and sexual violence abound. Again, officialdom, respectable society and its denizens, look the other way. Then wonder why the world is ending.
2b. Related to 2, the tertiary Junior Sec system. The explosion of tertiary education over the last decade has seen UWI's student population expand along with the amount of money funnelled to education. But the benefits have not included increased literacy or knowledge.
Social and cultural research at UWI and UTT mean producing Carnival bands–not studies which make sense of Trini reality. One reason is that people in charge of relevant departments (in my experience) stifle any such research. (This is why the only published local studies on the Internet and Facebook have been done by British anthropologist, Daniel Miller.) So with little idea as to the state, extent and dynamics of the problems, policy relies on guesswork, anecdotes, laughably flawed data, crooked foreign consultants, and talk radio.
3. The media. With institutions (family, home and school), whose function is to socialise citizens, effectively castrated, their roles have been left to the media. In 1988, Daniel Miller also did a study of the effect of soap operas in Trinidad (Young & Restless etc) and concluded that (inter alia) they performed the function of moral education.
Yes, the society en masse learned right from wrong in the 1980s via US soap operas. Of course, the implications went directly through the ears of UWI's finest. The consequences of the absence of socialising and moralising institutions was made most apparent post-1995 with the accession of the UNC, and the appearance of talk radio.
4. Related to all the above, denial and delusion and downright dishonesty on racial issues is a powerful crime driver. The issue of race is inextricably linked to politics and culture, and is implicated in every institution (health, education, business, religion). Every study on race and ethnicity, from Ryan and La Guerre's reports on media and business, to Ralph Premdas's edited collections (and many others) has indicated a reality not palatable to the dominant Afrocentric cultural fantasia/paradigm, and are therefore ignored.
The reality is that the PNM deliberately created a pathologically racialised society, and an Afrocentric mythology of entitlement, which several institutions (including the media) continue to perpetuate, and this is a major cause of crime.
Post-1996, talk radio made this glaringly explicit. The talkshow hosts, Umbala and Gladiator openly affiliated themselves with the PNM, and were not refuted, as they incited the black underclass with pearls of wisdom like: Indian doctors tying black women's tubes (subsequently made into a calypso, Genocide, by Singing Sandra); Indians are "vomit," and stealing the "patrimony" of "real" Trinidadians; that Indians were "taking over" UWI and so on.
The moral tale being spun via talk radio was of "Africans" being deprived of their birthright by the interlopers, "Indians." Many UWI academics were complicit, if not openly supportive. To date, only Ralph Henry, head of TATT in 2005, has admitted the potential effects of this when he compared it to the role of talk radio in Rwanda and Burundi.
The socialising effects of this rhetoric were felt on the population as a whole: among the black underclass, an almost overnight spike not just in murders, but also criminal behaviour and accelerated social dysfunction. Among the Indians, fear, resentment, and a pervasive sense of threat, and a similar alacrity to criminal behaviour, if not so overtly violent. From a systemic point of view, the society was engineered for an atmosphere of distrust, hatred, and resentment.
Combine all this–broken families, abused children, racial paranoia, impotent church and school–with an overarching mythology of wealth, the moral acceptability of "taking back" (aka reparation), pervasive media images of conspicuous consumption, and a frenzy to own and consume among the poor and dispossessed as well as the middle and upper classes, and you have created a cultural crime virus–with effects visible from kidnapping to Clico.
Now here's the really sick part: this isn't the first time this has happened. If you look at crime statistics between 1950 and 1956, total crime dropped. Between 1957 and 1966, crime doubled. This is identical to what happened between 1996 and 2001, and 2002 and 2010. Why and how could it happen twice in a lifetime?
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�2To be continued