Towards a Caribbean Criminology

• Author: Kenneth Pryce
• Pages: 3-18

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TOWARDS A CARIBBEAN CRIMINOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

The scientific study of crime and deviant

behaviour in the Caribbean as an

independent field of inquiry in its own right

is long overdue. This absence in the

Caribbean of an intellectual tradition

concerned with systematic investigation into

the forces of law, disorder and social control

is conspicuous in view of the fact that

apparent in the Caribbean for a long time

now, have been all the anomic features of

the universally increasing crime rate, now

regarded as a world phenomenon, rather

than a problem peculiar only to more

developed metropolitan societies. As Dudley

Allen, Commissioner of the Jamaica

Department of Correctional Services has put

it:

‘Crime and the fear of crime affect the

quality of life for millions of people in the

world. In a great many countries, rich and

poor, north and south, criminality is

influencing where people live, how they

behave and what bonds of………

community and personal interdependence

they decide to establish…… the

disproportionate crime of today and the

ways in which it begins to distort the

patterns of national and community life

makes it a distinct threat to the social

structure from which it has emerged’2.

THE CONCERN WITH CRIME IN THE

CARIBBEAN

The neglect of the study of crime is

particularly hard to justify in the Third World

Towards a

Caribbean

Criminology1

Kenneth Pryce

One

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CRIME, DELINQUENCY AND JUSTICE

context of the Caribbean where it is generally recognised that a relationship exits

between ‘modernisation’ and crime; and where, particularly in some of the

Anglophone Caribbean territories, the rapid intensification of violence, lawlessness

and ‘white collar’ corruption in the contemporary period, has brought in its wake

instability, economic ruin and mass fear and nervousness. These developments

should not be taken for granted nor condoned as the inevitable price we pay for

modernisation and development. On the contrary, there are issues that cry out

for analysis and interpretation as part and parcel of capitalist underdevelopment

and dependency in the region and should be the concern not only of the politician,

the jurist and the policymaker, but the sociologist and other social scientists as

well.

One response to the increasing problems of crime and lawlessness in the

Caribbean is the growing recognition in official circles of the need to understand

our crime problems scientifically. Evidence for this lies in the fact that in 1975 a

Caribbean Crime Conference was held at The University of the West Indies (UWI),

Mona, to discuss issues relating to the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of

Offenders and, as late as January, 1976 the Association of Caribbean Universities

and Research Institutes (UNICA) sponsored a ‘workshop’ of Caribbean professionals

and academics who met at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to look into

the whole business of the escalation of crime and violence in the Caribbean and

to consider the possibility of an exchange of information on the subject by the

different territories. The French, Dutch, Spanish and English-speaking countries

of the region were all represented at the workshop whose participants included

professionals from, Jamaica, Guyana, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago,

Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, the Virgin Islands and Suriname. All

participants at the conference underscored the singular lack of material on the

historical and sociological aspects of crime in Caribbean societies and the need to

study and evaluate the problems associated with the incidents of crime from a

Caribbean perspective.

THE IDEA OF CARIBBEAN CRIMINOLOGY

In view of the many worsening problems now facing us in our streets, in our

police stations, in our courts and in our corridors of power, such moves at an

official level are more than welcome. However, this burgeoning of intellectual

curiosity into the conditions of criminality and lawlessness should not be allowed

to develop in a purely policy oriented, pragmatic ad hoc fashion, divorced from

the emerging indigenous scholarship of Caribbean intellectual now developing

and dedicated to radically uncovering the vexed problems of power, poverty and

underdevelopment that plague the Antilles. What is needed then is a Criminology

that is pan-Caribbean in scope, a Caribbean Criminology grounded in the bedrock

of conditions peculiar to the region that attempts to illuminate the nature and