Maintaining society’s integrity

A 15-year-old student of the Mucurapo Junior Secondary School is in police custody after stabbing another 15-year-old on Wednesday. On Tuesday, a 17-year-old was sent to the Youth Training Centre (YTC) for robbing a Form Four ASJA Boys College student of $12. And on that same day, another young man lost his appeal against a three-year jail sentence, having been found guilty of possession of a cutlass when he was 15 years old.

It can be argued that all these individuals deserve their punishment, in that they could have chosen not to commit the particular acts which brought the force of the law down on them. But the issue is not so simple. Even the law recognises this, hence the reason that minors are treated differently than adult offenders. The logic is that a young person, not having yet reached the ‘age of reason’, has less responsibility for his actions than an adult. Unfortunately, many of our magistrates seem to overlook this message when handing out sentences. But, in any case, it is not sufficient for the law to simply acknowledge this fact of human nature. Following this jurisprudential guide, the society also has a responsibility to put measures in place to reduce such incidents and, when they occur, to help ensure that the individuals involved will learn from their error.

Incarceration can thus only be the first step, albeit a necessary one since the society has to be protected. But what is the future of the youth who has now been put into the YTC? Will he indeed get the training that is implied in the institution’s title? Or will his life now be ruined over $12? Surely it is important to find out if the YTC is accomplishing its stated goal of reforming youths — information which could be obtained by tracking former inmates to find out how many did not fall into crime or, more simply, by surveying inmates in the nation’s jails to discover how many of them were once in the YTC. We suspect, though, that no State agency has ever carried out any such survey.

There can be little doubt, however, that the way the State treats with young offenders has to be transformed. A 1997 survey of three juvenile institutions, carried out by the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, which is headed by Professor Ramesh Deosaran, found that only five percent of the young persons had been incarcerated for violent crimes, such as assault, manslaughter and murder. Thirty-eight percent were there for robbery, but a significant 27 percent were imprisoned for the odd offence of being "beyond control", with another 14 percent in for having run away from home. So many of the young persons aren’t in these institutions for criminal acts per se, but for having personal and psychological problems. And we wonder if the staff in these places are trained to deal with such youths.

Now it is true that most of our young people will not end up in institutions or run afoul of the law. But a good society is one which cares and protects that troubled minority whose circumstances place them on that same society’s fringes. Only by helping them can the society maintain its integrity, for the young persons it shuns will eventually become the seeds of its destruction.