Tweet
Aborting crime
Published: Wednesday | September 22, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
Din Duggan, Contributor SHORTLY AFTER five on a March morning in 2001, the serenity of Portmore was shattered by the piercing bark of gunshots. The silence returned momentarily before being disturbed again by men screaming orders and another barrage of gunfire. A man begged for his life and bawled out "Murder!" More shots. The peace of the night and the innocence of a community were irreparably broken.
What transpired on that morning has never been conclusively determined. What is indisputable, however, is that in a little house at Fifth Seal Way in a little community called Braeton, in large pools of blood, seven young men between the ages of 14 and 22 lay dead.
As coroners removed the bodies from the gory scene, Reneto Adams, then Senior Superintendent of Police and head of the Crime Management Unit, and a man who struck fear (and perhaps bullets) into the hearts of gunmen across the country, declared that justice had been delivered. The young men allegedly responsible for the deaths of a police constable several weeks earlier and a school principal, the previous night, were reduced to lifeless corpses.
Recently, in the aftermath of a similarly barbaric attack in which eight persons were brutally slaughtered by gunmen in Tredegar Park, St Catherine, the police gunned down two men who they believed participated in those killings. At the scene of the Tredegar Park incident, Mr Adams, now a private citizen, enunciated his doctrine as it pertains to criminals: "Where criminals are concerned, we are to identify them and treat them like the ferocious crocodiles and alligators, having them killed in the eggs before they are hatched ... They need to be wiped out before they are hatched."
A better way?
Is Mr. Adams right? What if instead of the cold ground in Portmore, a future killer's potential was terminated years before when a young lady walked into an abortion clinic, received a dose of anesthesia to dilate her cervix, and a hollow tube with a knife-edged tip connected to a vacuum sucked the possibility of a short, sad, deadly life from her womb?
For fear of being banished from every church, mosque, synagogue, bobo camp, and dancehall in Jamaica, let me clarify my position on the act of abortion: I am against it. That is easy for me to say. I am not a teenage girl faced with the prospect of bringing a child into the abject poverty and dilapidated social structure in which I dwell. In exercising my right to choose, or at least my right to advise a woman to choose, I would implore her to choose life. Under current laws in Jamaica, however, no woman has that right of choice. Generally speaking, women cannot lawfully undergo abortions and must, instead, resort to a smorgasbord of legally and medically ambiguous actions.
In his best-selling book, Freako-nomics, economist Steven Levitt concludes that of all the theories and suggestions proffered to stem the violent crime wave that gripped the United States (US) in the late 1980s - including enhanced policing methods, social intervention and even the economic expansion that soon followed - none, save for perhaps convicting and imprisoning more criminals, had as far-reaching and ameliorative an effect on violent crime as an unrelated and monu-mental decision in the US Supreme Court years earlier.
Roe versus wade
The pivotal 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade legalised abortion in the US. After Roe, young ladies seeking to terminate their unwanted pregnancies no longer faced legal uncertainty, unsafe conditions and social stigmatisation. And, despite the oft-misguided decisions of teenaged girls, it turns out that they are keenly astute judges of their ability to effectively raise children.
Twenty years after Roe, a wave of potentially unwanted, unloved and unsupervised children - prime candidates to lead lives of crime - simply did not exist. The growing crime monster that had long confounded social scientists, politicians, law enforcement and civilians alike, and threatened to consume a nation had, as an unintended byproduct of the Roe decision, been largely aborted.
It may certainly be objectionable to turn to abortion as a weapon in the assault on crime. But it is an idea - of which we need more. The morally infallible among us, who argue that aborting life, at any stage, is sinful and reprehensible under any circumstance, may well be correct. But I hope that they do appreciate that it is equally unconscionable to abandon the same, 20 years later, to lie lifeless in the Portmore morning dew.
Din Duggan, an attorney, gave up his legal career to pursue business and entrepreneurship. He is currently a global legal search firm. Contact: facebook.com/dinduggan, twitter.com/YoungDuggan, dinduggan@gmail.com.
Published: Wednesday | September 22, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
Din Duggan, Contributor SHORTLY AFTER five on a March morning in 2001, the serenity of Portmore was shattered by the piercing bark of gunshots. The silence returned momentarily before being disturbed again by men screaming orders and another barrage of gunfire. A man begged for his life and bawled out "Murder!" More shots. The peace of the night and the innocence of a community were irreparably broken.
What transpired on that morning has never been conclusively determined. What is indisputable, however, is that in a little house at Fifth Seal Way in a little community called Braeton, in large pools of blood, seven young men between the ages of 14 and 22 lay dead.
As coroners removed the bodies from the gory scene, Reneto Adams, then Senior Superintendent of Police and head of the Crime Management Unit, and a man who struck fear (and perhaps bullets) into the hearts of gunmen across the country, declared that justice had been delivered. The young men allegedly responsible for the deaths of a police constable several weeks earlier and a school principal, the previous night, were reduced to lifeless corpses.
Recently, in the aftermath of a similarly barbaric attack in which eight persons were brutally slaughtered by gunmen in Tredegar Park, St Catherine, the police gunned down two men who they believed participated in those killings. At the scene of the Tredegar Park incident, Mr Adams, now a private citizen, enunciated his doctrine as it pertains to criminals: "Where criminals are concerned, we are to identify them and treat them like the ferocious crocodiles and alligators, having them killed in the eggs before they are hatched ... They need to be wiped out before they are hatched."
A better way?
Is Mr. Adams right? What if instead of the cold ground in Portmore, a future killer's potential was terminated years before when a young lady walked into an abortion clinic, received a dose of anesthesia to dilate her cervix, and a hollow tube with a knife-edged tip connected to a vacuum sucked the possibility of a short, sad, deadly life from her womb?
For fear of being banished from every church, mosque, synagogue, bobo camp, and dancehall in Jamaica, let me clarify my position on the act of abortion: I am against it. That is easy for me to say. I am not a teenage girl faced with the prospect of bringing a child into the abject poverty and dilapidated social structure in which I dwell. In exercising my right to choose, or at least my right to advise a woman to choose, I would implore her to choose life. Under current laws in Jamaica, however, no woman has that right of choice. Generally speaking, women cannot lawfully undergo abortions and must, instead, resort to a smorgasbord of legally and medically ambiguous actions.
In his best-selling book, Freako-nomics, economist Steven Levitt concludes that of all the theories and suggestions proffered to stem the violent crime wave that gripped the United States (US) in the late 1980s - including enhanced policing methods, social intervention and even the economic expansion that soon followed - none, save for perhaps convicting and imprisoning more criminals, had as far-reaching and ameliorative an effect on violent crime as an unrelated and monu-mental decision in the US Supreme Court years earlier.
Roe versus wade
The pivotal 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade legalised abortion in the US. After Roe, young ladies seeking to terminate their unwanted pregnancies no longer faced legal uncertainty, unsafe conditions and social stigmatisation. And, despite the oft-misguided decisions of teenaged girls, it turns out that they are keenly astute judges of their ability to effectively raise children.
Twenty years after Roe, a wave of potentially unwanted, unloved and unsupervised children - prime candidates to lead lives of crime - simply did not exist. The growing crime monster that had long confounded social scientists, politicians, law enforcement and civilians alike, and threatened to consume a nation had, as an unintended byproduct of the Roe decision, been largely aborted.
It may certainly be objectionable to turn to abortion as a weapon in the assault on crime. But it is an idea - of which we need more. The morally infallible among us, who argue that aborting life, at any stage, is sinful and reprehensible under any circumstance, may well be correct. But I hope that they do appreciate that it is equally unconscionable to abandon the same, 20 years later, to lie lifeless in the Portmore morning dew.
Din Duggan, an attorney, gave up his legal career to pursue business and entrepreneurship. He is currently a global legal search firm. Contact: facebook.com/dinduggan, twitter.com/YoungDuggan, dinduggan@gmail.com.
Comment