Micheal Burke

Whenever I write about the makings of crime in our history, there are always some who interpret it as a viewpoint that nothing can be done. Far from it! What I aim to do is to use history to find a solution. And by touching base with history, we can understand crime better so that we can deal with it.

If you go to a good doctor with a health complaint, he will first try to find out what you have been doing before prescribing medicine. My point here is that good doctors refer to history.
Psychology is the study of behaviour, but a great deal of that has to do with the patient's history.

If I had the authority, no so-called historian could ever get a degree in the subject without doing at least an elementary course in psychology.

In that way, all historians properly referred to as such, would be able to offer solutions to our crime problems. And having expressed the above, Henry Morgan and the pirates are very relevant to the escalating crime all over Jamaica, particularly in St Catherine and St James. So is slavery and so are pre-independent and post-colonial politics.

When the Treaty of Madrid in 1670 had as part of its agreement the abolition of pirates, the English authorities found that there was no easy solution to controlling Henry Morgan and his cohorts. Part of the problem was that the English colonial governor of Jamaica turned a blind eye to piracy. That was the only way to ward off the Spanish invaders in their attempts to repossess Jamaica, which the British had forcibly taken from them.

After the Treaty of Madrid, the British colonial authorities found it necessary to imprison Morgan in the Tower of London for an invasion of Porto Bello, Panama. But this made it even more difficult to control his followers who were leaderless without Morgan. So Morgan was sent back to Jamaica as governor, because only he could control the pirates.

And Morgan controlled the pirates by distributing thousands of acres of land to them, where they owned African slaves who planted and reaped sugar cane, and milled the sugar cane into cane sugar. And in a day and age where to have land and pay taxes made one a part of the ruling class, the thieving, wicked cut-throats with their wild way of living became "respectable" aristocracy.

This is the fundamental difference between the history of Jamaica and that of Barbados. While Barbados was settled by law-abiding Britishers, Jamaica was settled by the scum of British society, prisoners sent here to do a term but who never returned to England and stayed and became pirates. And later the ruling class. That is where crime started in Jamaica.

Morgan died in 1688 and a disastrous earthquake destroyed Port Royal in 1692. Most of the Port Royal residents, themselves old pirates, left Port Royal and settled in Kingston; indeed, that is how Kingston became inhabited.
And this again only perpetuated crime as a way of life. Add to that the type of slavery practised by the British in Jamaica where slaves were placed in stud farms to breed more slaves. Out of this the rich sense of family life known in Africa was lost, which aggravated the crime situation.

By 1944, certain constitutional advances called Universal Adult Suffrage, allowed for all adults to vote. The two major political parties would find that their supporters had divided into violent gangs. It is believed that a few politicians fomented this early violence, where the weapons were stones and glass bottles.

Then there was 'Empire Windrush'. In this 13-year programme between 1948 and 1961, Jamaican adults went to England to work. Most of them were unable to send for their children who, for the most part, grew up without discipline under very poor supervision, if any at all. These children are today in their 50s and 60s. Having not been brought up properly, they could not bring up their own offspring who, for the most part, were born from very casual "one-night flings" with the opposite sex.

And this idle unemployable force made up of unwanted children was easy prey for a few unscrupulous politicians to issue guns to, beginning in the 1960s. After the elections, the politicians were unable to retrieve the guns. Now the gun criminals do not need the politicians, as they have obviously made other arrangements to continue their lives of crime. This is the legacy of Henry Morgan, which explains our current crime problems.

The solution is in creating a whole new mindset. Prisons should be places where criminal habits are unlearnt and a pattern of behaviour that fits the vision of the new and transformed society that some of us would like to see are taught.

Schools should be places where we go about creating the new mindset. But who is going to do it? We read in Matthew 9: 37 and in Luke 10: 2 that "the harvest is rich but the workers are few. Therefore, let us pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers into his vineyard".

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