Commentary

Poverty is not the cause of crime

I WAS ONLINE yesterday when I came across this poll on The Gleaner's website. The poll question was "Is poverty a major cause of crime" or something of the sort. There were three categories for response: yes, no and maybe. I clicked on 'no' and submitted my answer and then looked at how the responses were going. To my amazement, 65 per cent of respondents said they believed that poverty is a major cause of crime, 26 per cent said no and nine per cent said maybe.

That 65 per cent, I believe, is what is wrong with this country because that two-thirds majority is quick to lay blame squarely at the feet of the poor for most of the crime being committed in Jamaica today.

Rich criminals

It is typically a Jamaican attitude though, blaming everyone and everything else for the problems we face instead of taking the blame on ourselves. If we are to believe this poll, there are no rich criminals in this country, which could not be farther from the truth, because what we are in fact saying is that people become killers, drug pushers and crack addicts because they are poor.

In fact, if you ask me, the rich criminals are the ones who contribute to crime more than any poor criminal ever could. They are the ones with the resources to bring in the guns and the bullets, the ones who control the large shipments of contraband coming onto our shores, the ones who pay the police to turn a blind eye and the politicians to keep their mouths shut. Which poor man do you know who is able to bring in a shipment of cocaine worth several million US dollars and several hundred thousand US dollars worth of guns to protect the drugs?

When I was growing up in the country, there was a lot of poverty around me but there was virtually no crime. When I was little and somebody got killed, people talked about it for weeks because such things were rare. Sure, occasionally an overly jealous farmer would beat the stuffing out of his wife or girlfriend because he heard she was at a bar with her cousin drinking a Red Stripe and, of course, there would be the occasional incident of a praedial thief who was usually beaten to within an inch of his life, but such things occurred every few months or sometimes years. Today, whenever someone gets killed you are almost forced to ask "So, what's new?"

What is real is that we have failed our children over the last 20 years or so. We failed to teach them about things like how to be courteous, how to say thank you and good day; not to covet his or her neighbour; to work hard to achieve success, and that going to prison is not a line of work.

And that is what causes crime. We have raised a generation of kids who have no moral standards, who believe that it is okay to do what they want to do no matter who they hurt in the process and that spending time in jail is the way to develop a good reputation.

That is where the poverty comes in. We have become morally and socially bankrupt and that is what causes crime.

When I began working at The Gleaner in 1990, there were just fewer than 300 murders a year; 15 years later, we are almost at 200 murders a month. What, weren't there poor people living in Jamaica back then?