Murder incarceration numbers fuel alarm

At last week’s closing of the Criminal Assizes of the High Court, the Superintendent of Prisons gave his usual report on the prison population (reported in the WEEKEND SEARCHLIGHT of August 4). The citizens of this country had already been increasingly worried about the issue of violent crime in our society, but the Superintendent’s report hardly made us any more comfortable. Fresh in our minds is the mass shooting of a few weeks ago in which five persons lost their lives and the many other shootings earlier this year.

However we analyse and pontificate on the worrying incidents and fatalities, one fact cannot be ignored. That is, in a small society like ours, too many unauthorized persons have access to guns, illegal weapons, and use them with deadly effect too. How are these people continuing to get access to these weapons of war, and how come the guns are not being used only in supposedly drug-related incidents, but also on a more individual scale? The inability of our local security forces, regional ones too, to tackle this problem is now admitted even at the highest levels and we are apparently depending on a foreign power, reluctant to deal with that problem at home, to solve ours for us.

As if these were not more than enough for us to worry about, the report by the acting Superintendent of Prisons, to which we referred earlier, presents us with another area of grave concern for the society as a whole. According to the Superintendent (Ag.), there are now more than 100 persons, 1 for every 1000 persons of our population, in prison on murder charges. The vast majority, 97, as expected, is male, 59 of these having been sentenced already, 8 awaiting sentencing and 30 yet to be tried. Two of the three females have already been sentenced.

We have a prison population, according to the latest Prison Report, of 392 persons. It means that more than 25 per cent of our prisoners are incarcerated for the ultimate crime, murder. In other words, one in every four persons in prison, is there on a murder charge, awaiting trial, convicted or already sentenced. It is of little comfort to us that given the ruling of the British Privy Council, we cannot even attempt to carry out death sentences, should we so choose.

We continue to debate on religious, philosophical and humanitarian grounds about the causes of this dreadful situation. But a solution is still a long-term shot and, in the meantime, we are faced with this dreadful situation. Politicization of the situation and scare-mongering are not helping, and we have long called for a broad-based, national approach.

We are therefore happy to repeat statements by prominent local barrister, Ronald Marks in expressing his grave concern about “indiscriminate shooting in public places”. We strongly endorse his call to us all in saying, “We have to work together….to take back our country.”

Are we all up to the challenge?