News of the recovery of the bodies of two Americans in the parish of St Mary, where they had both reportedly been conducting missionary work, seemed to have shocked the populace significantly.

It would seem that because the victims were expatriates, the reactions needed to have been sounded from the rafters or from all hilltops across the island. Such was the effect of this event that even the spanking new national security minister was said to have not only extended his earlier call for divine intervention, but was also reported as stating that his Government would be exploring the possibility of the resumption of capital punishment for murder convicts as a deterrent to this type of heinous crime.

The fact that the murderous rampage that has plagued the island for decades had only now taken centre stage because two Americans had fallen victims seemed to have been pushed aside.

The sudden knee-jerk statement from the minister of national security was obviously made to the gallery and clearly had no serious intent. In any event, it serves to bring home the fact that crime in Jamaica was never a People’s National Party nor a Jamaica Labour Party problem, but a national problem.

Maybe the significance of the latest event could be that it will serve as an opportunity for the new Government to implement a much-needed long-term approach to crime and violence, backed up by the necessary investment of billions of dollars in social and infrastructural development funding, in order to change both the trajectory of social attitudes that give succour to the entrenchment of this problem.

In addition, there is the need for a corresponding investment in time and patience of all stakeholders for such measures to sink their roots into the society before they will begin bearing fruit.

It is useful to point out that murder is a malady that is as old as civilisation itself, and in every instance where the State has sanctioned executions, there has been no signal that such an approach has provided deterrence. In this regard, Jamaica, unfortunately, is no different.

Our own penal codes were drawn from our British linkages, and as the British effected the dismantling of execution as a form of capital punishment, so have we, albeit in part forced by the UK Privy Council ruling in the landmark Pratt & Morgan case. Our murder problem exists for very much the same reasons today as existed pre-1977 when Pratt and Morgan committed the crime of murder.

The Privy Council ruling some 17 years later did not create the conditions that today feed the problem, but was consistent with a direction being taken in many countries that are signatories to the UN Charter for the protection of human rights, and Jamaica is one such signatory country. This joins us at the hip with these countries as far as dispensing with capital punishment is concerned, and any return to or consideration of revisiting this kind of punishment will seriously jeopardise existing and future economic and other relationships with these member/signatory countries.

That apart, Jamaica’s problem has always been our proven incapacity to provide a meaningful and believable system of justice due primarily to the lack of attention (including the provision of adequate funding) to our justice system. Add to that the fact that the pathetic approaches that pass for policing in Jamaica hamstring the State’s ability to provide iron-clad cases to the courts for successful prosecution and convictions. In these circumstances, the odds of killing another person on the island and getting away with it are staggeringly in favour of the murderer, aided and abetted by the anti-informer culture that is commonplace in almost every single Jamaican community.

Lined up against the pathetic clear-up rate of criminal murders and other dangerous crimes, it is not surprising to anyone paying attention that Jamaica ranks sixth among the most dangerous countries in the world. With a population of just over 2.9 million, our murder rate is a staggering 39.3 Jamaicans per 100,000, justifying completely the statement by the CNN anchor that Jamaica is indeed a very violent country.

The reactions to the CNN and other overseas media reports on the latest killings have been quite instructive as Jamaicans across the spectrum, both here in the Diaspora as well as back home, attempted to flagellate the reporter(s) with their own hypocritical responses. Our reality is that Jamaica is in fact a murderous country, and this is a label that we have worked assiduously at earning.

Our security apparatus requires significant overhaul and investment, yet the new Government, in its recent presentation of the estimates of expenditure for the coming year, has indicated a significant cut in the national security budget. In the circumstances, the call for resumption of hanging by the minister is a demonstration that, like his predecessors, he is completely out of his depth… adrift at sea in a boat without an engine and without an oar.

Our society has been marching along a path of decadence and social deconstruction for years, aided and abetted by a lack of social interventions. Alongside this, our media reporting provides an everyday serving for our psychogenic provocation. This is combined with the cultural penetration of the even more decadent local popular culture which glorifies the ownership and use guns, and by extension, the ease with which we resort to violence to settle domestic issues. Crime generally, and murder specifically, are symptoms of the existence of deeper problems, hence the need for study and implementation of the solutions drawn from those findings.

I side with the decision to dispense with hanging and any other State execution as I am convinced that no one, not even the State, has the right to take another’s life. There is enough documented and other empirical evidence to dispel the thinking that taking the life of one who kills another serves as a deterrent to murder. Killing, regardless of how it is done and regardless of the reason advanced, is barbaric.

The solution must be the removal of the murderers from society, as well as using the opportunity to conduct scientific as well as social investigations into the mindset of the criminal so as to better understand and create social programmes to correct the circumstances that would lead to such behaviour.

Until we start doing that, it may be worth our while to remember that “An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.”

– Richard Hugh Blackford is the owner of Yardabraawd International LLC, and is a self-taught artist, writer and social commentator. He shares his time between Coral Springs, Florida and Kingston, Jamaica.