PERSONS WHO COMMIT CRIMES SHOULD INDEED BE PUNISHED

Dear Sir,

Persons that commit crimes should indeed be punished. Our patriarchal
society has come up with the idea that hiding them away from the rest
of the world is the answer to dealing with criminals. However, what
happens when our prisons become too full to accommodate all of those
we deem as 'criminals'?

We cannot expect to hide the undesirables away forever and have the
government pay for them to rot in a cell. Those who have not
committed serious crimes are not eligible for long sentences by our
system of law and therefore will be let out in a few months or years.

When they are let out without any rehabilitative efforts, they are no
better than when they began their incarceration. In fact, prison
conditions of being out of society, lacking normal socialization and
being treated less than human often turns out individuals who are
even less capable of normalizing within our society and therefore
more prone to continuing their criminal behavior.

It is important to investigate the root of what led the individual to
commit the particular crime and offer some type of psychological and
behavioral modification to ensure that he/she no longer has the
desire to commit crime. It is not enough to keep a person locked up
and expect that once they are released they will not break the law.

In the instance of violent crime there are definite psychological
disturbances that cause an individual to feel they should and will go
ahead with the crime. For example, a man who rapes a woman may have
been sexually abused as a child, he may have grown up in a violent
home and developed certain feelings toward women and what he feels is
morally right.

This does not make the fact that he raped acceptable but without
exploring the possible causes and trying to change his way of
thinking and behaving, this criminal will be released and will
probably commit rape again.

In instances of nonviolent crimes we need to look at the individual
and assess what social conditions caused him or her to break the law.
For example, a person convicted of trafficking narcotics should
indeed be punished, but after serving his time and being released
into society he will more than likely return to his previous way of life.

By looking into what factors influenced his decision to sell drugs,
we can offer him rehabilitative guidance to not continue the
behavior. Perhaps he grew up in a family where narcotic sales were
the norm, perhaps he fell through the cracks of our educational
system and found that selling drugs was an easy way to make a living.

Whatever the reasons may be, we as a society need to look at these
and rehabilitate the human before sending him back into society after
serving his sentence. Also, by being able to identify the social ills
and psychological inconsistencies that influenced these individuals
to commit crimes, we can prepare our youth and begin to take
preventative measures with them to decrease the instance of crime.

It is easy for us to forget that these people are human. As a
law-abiding Caymanian I do not think that criminals should be allowed
to walk free and continue to terrorize my people. However, without
rehabilitative efforts and preventative efforts we will soon find
ourselves surrounded by criminals and prisons.

There is an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Well
sometimes that child turns out to be a criminal and it is only the
village to blame. We need to investigate what led the individual to
break the law so that we can prevent that from reoccurring in our children.

We must also remember that many convicts in Northward and Fairbanks
are brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands, fathers, sons and
daughters. We need to rehabilitate these people so that they can
return to their loved ones and function in society. I believe this is
possible. It is only a matter of how much we are willing to work on
actual rehabilitation and prevention.

We are blessed with a men's prison which offers decent living
conditions and a few rehabilitative programs but we still have a long
way to go. Organizations need to actively network with each other in
their programming and bring these programs to the public so that
prevention and rehabilitation are consistent and accessible to all in
our society.

Nina Scott