THE other night I watched an interview with two former commissioners of police and one former deputy commissioner. There was Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, Commissioner Owen Ellington and Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Novelette Grant. All are currently retired.

I found it interesting. I rather liked the idea of using former persons who have held office giving their opinion on a current crisis. I agreed with all they said – well, to a large degree – and each one said something that was really thought-provoking. However, for today, I would like to highlight what former DCP Grant said.

She spoke of many things but her point on “not all stakeholders working together” was the part that I found most interesting. The interview did not allow her to expand on it but I would like to use this concept to demonstrate three areas of our system that seem to be working independently.

They are the judiciary, the police force and the penal system.

The police are over performing with arrests. The system is bursting at the seams. They want one thing – long, really long sentences. “Lost dem,” is the desire on most police officers’ lips on sentencing day.

Sentencing, however, is often a bone of contention with the public and the police. People complain about sentences being too light, too inconsistent, or if you are a gang member’s mother, too harsh!

So let us start here.

The amendment to the Criminal Justice Administration Act 2015 addressed mandatory minimum sentences and discounts for guilty pleas that vary depending on what stage you enter your plea. Now if a lawyer explains this and I wrote it, my editor would cut it and you would fall asleep. It is just really technical and reminds me of my many years getting borderline grades in statistics courses in university. It is that complicated.

So, this is ‘sentencing simplified’.

The judge is given a mandatory minimum that he cannot go below. However, he is bound by law to give a discount of 50 per cent for a guilty plea, if the plea is given at the genesis of the process.

Now, he can start anywhere on the sentence range, from mandatory minimum to maximum. He just cannot go below the minimum. However, if he goes above the minimum he has to justify why, because it is subject to appeal.

He cannot therefore give a criminal who pleads guilty for shooting with intent 30 years despite the sentence range being 15 to life, without there being aggravating circumstances.

So if a criminal shoots at you because you are from a rival community and does not hit you because the dunce has no training in the use of a firearm, then he is pretty much bound to start at the 15-year minimum.

The judge has to give the ‘cruff’ a 50 per cent discount, so that is now seven and a half years. Then the judge has to take off the time spent in remand. So now the cruff is at seven, this despite the fact that he is also being convicted of possession of a firearm and ammunition.

Here is where the system really starts operating out of sync. The penal system treats a year as eight months, not 12, so that seven years just became less than five.

We have not started to discuss parole or probation yet. That can be curtailed by a judge but unless so bound, a convicted man can get out after serving one year and two and a half months for every year he was sentenced.

So think! This guy just tried to kill someone, yet he could be out of jail in less than an electoral term.

Okay, so now the cruff is in the penal system, he is caged like an animal in a crowded cell. He meets criminals from around the country to network. He is given an enamel bucket to defecate in, which he shares during lockdown with his cellmates. Then eventually, he is released.

Okay. Now he is not rehabilitated in any way, shape, or form. He is worse. He cannot work in the civil service, security industry (thankfully), nor any arm of Government, needless to say the police or army. No large firm will take him. Most small ones will not either.

So this cruff, who took a decision to take a life and, thankfully, failed is out in about five years with no possibility of employment. He is being released to kill several of his enemies and a few innocent people like me or you. Or our kids.

This what I just detailed is not the posturing of a country ready for war. Nor is it various stakeholders working together for a common and planned goal. This is disjointed anarchy.

Firstly, there should be no sentencing discount. The judges did not create it, so stop blaming them.

Secondly, there should be no bail for gun offences.

Thirdly, if you are really that way inclined to believe that killers have the right to change, then at least ensure you try to rehabilitate them.

The same Parliament that passed this aforementioned amendment needs to get rid of it.

I understand that it speeds up cases and we cannot try them all. Or can we?

Can we build enough remand facilities to warehouse them once charged? Can we build enough prisons to keep them if we go to a mandatory minimum of 20 years in calendar time, not prison time?

Well, it is pretty much the only thing that is going to work. If we do not embrace and create an apparatus for mass incarceration, we will never return to a normal country. It is that simple. So stop cursing and criticising the people who have been given the basket to haul the water.

Yes, there could be a strategy of drafting in the citizens into the police force as auxiliary but are you patriotic enough to send out your son to fight beside the police?

We keep comparing ourselves to the best side of countries that are not comparable to us, whilst ignoring the dark history of said countries.

The United States used mass incarceration to win the crack war. Many condemn them. I do not.

A country does what is necessary to save innocent lives and establish control. There is no acceptability of anarchy with shoot-outs in the streets, like Dodge City. A Government does what is necessary.

Yet we look on them at a murder rate of five per 100,000 against our 47 per 100,000 and pick the parts that show moderation whilst ignoring the fact that this country hands out 40-year sentences for narcotic violations and life imprisonment for three convictions of relatively minor offences.

When will we adapt their extreme practices?

If we are going to copy something, then copy the part that can take us out from under this hell.

We can blame and bitch all day. We can fire and re-elect every couple years. But it is only when we are all working towards logical, attainable solutions will we have success.

All stakeholders need to be part of one big plan, where each understands the part the other plays and does their part to assist in carrying out the original mandate. That being we should try to get rid of these killers as we get them firmly in our grasp and lose them among their own in a prison, for the remainder of their dangerous lives.

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