With murders becoming more grotesque, sociologists are seeking answers to the question: What is responsible for the island’s deepening problem with violent crimes, and is something inherent to Jamaica, which predisposes some of its citizens, and more so the young Jamaican male, to violence?

“We are up against a cancer, a cancer that was allowed to grow. Our crime problem is deep-seated and just like a cancer, it is a consequence of a whole range of things,” says Dr Orville Taylor, sociologist and lecturer with the University of the West Indies.

The figures tell the grim tale.

In 2003, there were 975 reported murders. Last year, that number rose to 1,471, and over 300 people have been murdered since the start of this year. Added to that, in 2003 there were 1,145 shootings, 931 rapes and 1,710 robberies. Nearly all involved varying levels of violence.

Attempting to supply answers in the face of such startling statistics and with the nature of the murders becoming ever more gruesome, Taylor believes that violent crime is largely a lower-class phenomenon, although it is in no way confined to the lower classes.

“Now, don’t make anyone misquote me in saying that crime is a result of poverty or it is confined to this particular class. But there are certain groups within the society that are more exposed as a result of their socio-economic status,” he said. “What you have here in Jamaica is a fairly large inner-city type population of that very fragile, marginal and high risk group of ”young men’.

And let’s face it, it is mostly a young man phenomenon where the murders are committed by youths in the 18-24 age group.”

Urban anthropologist, Herbert Gayle, also with the UWI, agrees with Taylor. “They (inner cities) only make up 10 per cent of the population but they account for over 80 per cent of homicides,” Gayle said, adding that within inner cities, and indeed in some areas outside inner cities, violence was the primary source of power, of economics and for the expression of frustration.

“Violence is a tool. It is a tool of socio-economic power, a tool of expression of grievance that is how you get feuds,” he says.

At a time when many inner-city residents continue to be regarded as outsiders without easy access to resources, basic or otherwise, violence assumes a greater appeal, he argues.

“They are excluded from education, from housing. They are excluded from information, even information on sexual and reproductive health. If you don’t have alternatives and if they are not immediate and visible, you will still kill,” the anthropologist adds.

Both Taylor and Gayle hold that the inner city’s propensity for violence rests with the island’s early political history.

“In the 1970s, we had almost a kind of civil war where Labourites were against PNP. Then you had the WPJ (Workers Party of Jamaica) which also figured in some of the rumours. So I make no bones about it.

There was an arming of the lower classes by the politicians of the 1970s,” Taylor believes. “We might want to deny it and play legal games if you wish but… I think we just need to be honest among ourselves and call a spade a spade.”

However, says he, in the intervening years, there had been a shift in the power relations between politicians and members of the lower classes, whose travel overseas and involvement in the transatlantic drug trade have put them in a position to procure their own guns with which they have developed a sort of love affair over time.

“In the 1980s, I think the rules of the game changed a bit where the tail started to wag the dog with the internationalisation of the drug trade. So there was the demand for marijuana. Later on, some people got involved in some other kinds of drugs and in the 1980s it became a little easier for Jamaicans to travel outside of the country,” says Taylor.

“With this exportation of our manpower, and in the drug trade, a lot of money started flowing back into our country and ostensibly into the inner cities. Thus the dons developed not simply as lieutenants to politicians but as rulers in their own right.”

For his part, Gayle, who is doing his doctoral studies on transatlantic violence and the drug trade, insists that as one response to the situation, political garrisons must be dismantled.

“There is going to have to be the political will one day to dismantle garrisons. It is as simple as that because even drug distribution is being done within the frame of politics. Whether or not the MPs are aware of it is no longer important,” Gayle argues.

“What is important is that communities, trans-atlantically, move from a JLP community to a JLP community that they create in Britain or in the United States. They distribute drugs along these lines so the political identity remains intact and becomes a part of the political economy of violence.”

Gayle believes that dismantling of the garrisons needed to be done as part of the effort to reintegrate inner cities – which have developed their own value system and mode of doing things over time – into mainstream society.

“A lot of people are JLP and PNP (or) Junglists and Tivolites first, before they are Jamaicans. So we end up almost having states within states,” Gayle says, alluding to the work of criminologist, Dr Anthony Harriott that testifies to this. “Harriott has spent a lot of time outlining how people in inner cities have a political frame of identity and social identity rather than an identity of being Jamaican.”

He adds that their reintegration is of particular importance since while they represent only about 10 per cent of the island’s population of 2.6-million people, they account for an estimated 80 per cent of the homicides.

Taylor threw into the mix the lack of an ideology among pockets of the population, saying he had noticed that in the absence of ideology, “you have a set of people who are not controllable because they don’t really believe in anything.

“They believe in the colours of the political party but they do not understand what it is the political party stands for.”

This problem, he notes, is made worse by the sort of political patronage under which many youth grew up, leaving some today unable or otherwise unwilling to enter the labour force.

“As a consequence (of the political patronage of the 70s and 80s) they didn’t develop the kinds of skills, which were necessary for proper integration in the labour force. Furthermore, with this clientelistic approach you have (the emergence of) a sort of parasitic group.

This parasitic group transmitted what I would call a kind of culture of poverty on to the next generation,” he says.

“So whether they are biological sons or not, this kind of dysfunctional socialisation toward the labour force became cultural and became endemic (and) we now have a second generation of young men and probably now a third that doesn’t really have any intention or desire to enter into the labour force.”

Another dimension to the crime problem pinpointed by Gayle was the issue of male pride, a source of many of the crimes being committed, be they rape, robbery or murder. Both he and Taylor underscore the fragility of the masculinity of the Caribbean male, in light of the slavery experience, saying that it is an experience which has left them in constant pursuit of reaffirming their manhood.

“It is male pride that is causing so many deaths; it is the trigger cause of the bulk of our murders in Jamaica. I have seen these guys save for four months to buy one Nike (shoes). And you step on him Nike, yuh fi dead,” Gayle suggests. “It is simple. The man has now found something to put on his foot that has so much of his persona.

The fact is it took four months to buy, it has made girls look at him for the first time, it has brought respect from his peers and you attacked it.”