Understanding Crime In Jamaica: New Challenges For Public Policy

Understanding Crime in Jamaica: New Challenges for Public Policy Edited by Anthony Harriott University of the West Indies Press Understanding Crime in Jamaica: New Challenges for Public Policy Understanding Crime in Jamaica: New Challenges for Public Policy Edited by Anthony Harriott University of the West Indies Press Jamaica • Barbados • Trinidad and Tobago University of the West Indies Press 1A Aqueduct Flats Mona Kingston 7 Jamaica www.uwipress.com © 2003 by The University of the West Indies Press All rights reserved. Published 2003 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1 CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA Understanding crime in Jamaica: new challenges for public policy / edited by Anthony Harriott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 976-640-144-6 1. Crime – Jamaica. 2. Crime prevention – Jamaica. 3. Crime – Political aspects. 4. Crime – Economic aspects. 5. Women – Crimes against – Jamaica. 6. Tourists – Crimes against – Jamaica. I. Harriott, Anthony. HV6868.5.U64 2003 364.97272 Cover design by Robert Harris. Book design by Roy Barnhill. Printed in Canada. Contents Acknowledgements / vii Overview / ix 1 The Jamaican Crime Problem: New Developments and New Challenges for Public Policy / 1 Anthony Harriott 2 Badness-Honour / 13 Obika Gray 3 The Historical Roots of Violence in Jamaica: The Hearne Report 1949 / 49 Amanda Sives 4 Garrison Politics and Criminality in Jamaica: Does the 1997 Election Represent a Turning Point? / 63 Mark Figueroa and Amanda Sives 5 Social Identities and the Escalation of Homicidal Violence in Jamaica / 89 Anthony Harriott 6 From the Footnotes and into the Text: Victimization of Jamaican Women / 113 Marlyn J. Jones 7 The Impact of Crime on Tourist Arrivals in Jamaica: A Transfer Function Analysis / 133 Dillon Alleyne and Ian Boxill 8 Perceptions of Crime and Safety among Tourists Visiting the Caribbean / 157 John W. King v 9 Tourist Harassment: Review and Survey Results / 177 Jerome L. McElroy 10 Crime and Public Policy in Jamaica / 197 Don Robotham Contributors / 239 Acknowledgements This book had its beginnings in a conference on crime and criminal justice in the Caribbean which was held on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies in February 2001. A number of the articles in this volume were first presented as papers at the conference. I wish to thanks the authors for their patience and cooperation in the effort to shape them into a somewhat unified and coherent volume. The effort would not have been possible without the generous support of the principal of the Mona campus, Professor Kenneth Hall; the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor Barrington Chevannes; and the head of the Department of Government, Professor Stephen Vasciannie, all of whom facilitated my leave of absence from departmental duties to take up a Mona Research Fellowship which afforded me the time to complete the work on this volume (among other things). Ms Shivaun Hearne and other members of the staff of the University of the West Indies Press put considerable effort into preparing the manuscript for publication. I wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to them. Chapters 5 and 10 were published – in somewhat different forms – as articles in the Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Social Psychology and Wadabaji, respectively. I thank the editors of these journals for their kind permission to publish these chapters. vii Editor’s Overview Despite the severity and seemingly intractable nature of the crime problem in Jamaica, the literature on this aspect of life has been fairly sparse. The decades of the 1980s and 1990s saw the publication of only two books on this problem (Ellis 1992; Headley 1994) and