Look at the ages of the most wanted men on the list that the St James police released yesterday.

Almost all of them are under 30, unemployed and from what we understand, have had several brushes with the law.
Bitter, hardened young criminals who have murdered, raped and robbed their way through life; prison doesn't deter them.
Let's hope that the new anti-crime measures announced by the Government will have the desired effect on this particular breed of vagabonds, who must not be confused with those criminals of earlier eras who were products of a different anthropology.

These are they which must be caught from the cradle, before the venom of poverty and other anti-social influences warp them.

For if we don't, after a while we will simply not have the space to house them in prison. What will happen then?

Where will the money to maintain them come from?
We see from the story in today's edition that the police are offering $100,000 each in the face of scarce resources for information leading to their capture. And while we really hope the gesture yields positive results, it would be short-sighted to believe that this addresses the bigger problem, which is how to treat with them for the rest of their productive lives and how to deal with the many, many other young men and yes, women, whose names are not yet on the list.

As we said in this space yesterday, the new anti-crime measures represent a good place from which to start tackling the problem. But we cannot afford to yield to the temptation of thinking that the measures are some sort of cure-all for the evil that is manifesting itself in our society through crime, because they just aren't.

Let's say these criminals are caught, tried, found guilty and sentenced to three or four decades in prison. What do we do with them when they are released? How do we contain the domestic fall-out that their periods of incarceration will impose upon their children?

Let us remember that we are not referring to a few isolated cases here, but rather hundreds of misfits who will impact society in ways that are too complex to detail here.
It would be folly to think that all, or even enough of them, will be deterred from returning to their criminal ways by indiscreet detention periods.

They will have to be reached through persuasion as well. Somebody, preferably their parents, will have to sit down and persuade them that robbing and killing people are not ways to make a living. And in the absence of parents to fulfil this critical role, society must pick up the slack and get the job done. That includes the public and private sectors.

For the fact is that children cannot bring themselves up.
They need guidance.

For without it they will fall by the wayside and land on lists like the one released by the St James police yesterday.

Mothers can't father

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'