Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

The more ed­u­ca­tion a per­son re­ceives, the less like­ly they are to be en­gaged in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

That view by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley was point­ed out by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day re­ply­ing to a query from Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark.

Mark asked if the min­is­ter could say whether or not the Gov­ern­ment had de­vel­oped a pol­i­cy on us­ing ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing as an an­ti-crime strat­e­gy. This he said fol­lowed the state­ment made by the Prime Min­is­ter when he ad­dressed stu­dents and staff at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny on June 30, 2024.

Gads­by-Dol­ly said, “The Prime Min­is­ter was pel­lu­cid in his speech, with re­gard to the Gov­ern­ment’s strat­e­gy on the role of ed­u­ca­tion and skills train­ing in the re­duc­tion of cor­rup­tion and crim­i­nal­i­ty.

“To quote the words of the Ho­n­ourable Prime Min­is­ter, ‘This is­sue tran­scends pol­i­tics, race, re­li­gion, eth­nic­i­ty, na­tion­al­i­ty, ide­ol­o­gy and ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tion. It strikes at the heart of Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Caribbean re­gion.’

“Cor­rup­tion and crim­i­nal­i­ty con­sume our lim­it­ed re­sources and have a de­bil­i­tat­ing ef­fect on the growth of busi­ness and en­ter­prise, there­by di­rect­ly im­pact­ing eco­nom­ic growth and ac­tiv­i­ty, the avail­abil­i­ty of jobs, the ex­pan­sion of en­tre­pre­neur­ial spir­it and op­por­tu­ni­ties for fi­nan­cial and so­cial progress.”

“Ed­u­ca­tion and crime are said to have an in­verse causal re­la­tion­ship; that is, the more ed­u­ca­tion one re­ceives, the less like­ly one is to be en­gaged in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty. Against this back­ground, one can bet­ter con­tex­tu­alise the con­sid­er­able in­vest­ments made by the Gov­ern­ment to pro­vide many and var­ied op­por­tu­ni­ties for pos­i­tive youth de­vel­op­ment, among the oth­er crime pre­ven­tion strate­gies.”

Mark al­so asked whether the Health Min­istry in­tends to im­ple­ment rec­om­men­da­tions out­lined by the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO) in its re­port on the Neona­tal In­ten­sive Care Unit (NICU) of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said that be­fore the PA­HO re­view, the min­istry im­ple­ment­ed sev­er­al mea­sures to im­prove the man­age­ment and op­er­a­tions of all the Neona­tal In­ten­sive Care Units (NICUs) through­out the pub­lic health sec­tor. He de­tailed those im­ple­ment­ed from 2016 to 2020, rang­ing from Na­tion­al Com­mit­tees pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal ad­vice and strength­en­ing poli­cies and op­er­a­tions of NICUs in all Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties (RHAs) to the guide to best prac­tices to en­vi­ron­men­tal clean­ing for in­fec­tion pre­ven­tion in all health­care fa­cil­i­ties.