TITLE: Deported Volume 1 Entry and Exit Findings Jamaicans Returned Home from the US between 1997 and 2003
AUTHORS: Bernard Headley et al
REVIEWER: Mel Cooke
Publisher: Stephenson Litho Press
NOBODY IS going to give you the money to make the weapon to hurt them. Nobody. Not even George Bush; he just stops at giving motives. So when the public affairs officer at the United States Embassy asked Bernard Headley in 2003 if he would be interested in "analysing a data set on deportees returned to Jamaica from the United States", they were as sure as the Member of Parliament of a garrison constituency that the results would be in their favour.
The confidence in the outcome was of 'Don Kingesque' proportions, as Headley readily acknowledges that "this project was funded in part through a grant agreement with the U.S. Department of State, acting through the public affairs section of the Embassy of the United States in Kingston, Jamaica".
Futhermore, Bernard Headley makes his position very clear from the outset of Deported: Volume 1, which is subtitled Entry and Exit Findings Jamaicans Returned Home From the US Between 1997 and 2003. After attending the 'Criminal Justice and Deportations: The Invisible Crisis' conference in (where else?) New York City:
"We also agreed, however, that sending back to the shores of Jamaica and other Caribbean nations large numbers of Caribbean-born but 'American-raised' violent criminals, who then became disproportionately responsible for their countries' horrendous crime problem, is not one of the 'sins' - or is it the aim - of current deportation practice?"
CAPACITY FOR MISINFORMATION
So what we have in Deported: Volume 1 is an 80-page American prompted and part-funded book, with American data, analysed on good faith by a Jamaican who, within a year of being approached to do the project, was otherwise convinced of the outcome. All this, of course, does not make the book's conclusions inherently flawed. The only thing that would cause that is if the data supplied by the U.S. used in the analysis are false. We do know that they lied about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq so the capacity for misinformation is there. Of course, chances are that the issue is not worthy of lies of WMDs proportion, after all, Jamaica has only coconut oil.
And, it is also stated that this is a preliminary study, with the expectation that it will lead to more studies as well as dialogue between the governments of Jamaica and the U.S.A.
Deported: Volume 1 opens with the bloody part of the issue, a part of a story from The Gleaner of July 14, 2004, speaking of the violence in Spanish Town which followed the murder of the head of the 'One Order' gang, Oliver 'Bubba' Smith, who was deported from the U.S. in May 2002, one of 1,558 Jamaicans 'forcibly returned' that year. This, the highest profile deportee case during the period of the study (the first data were handed over in December 2003) is used as a lead-in to the analysis. It is established that Bubba was in the U.S. for eight years, entering not as a child but at 30 years old, and was already in deep trouble with the law before going to the U.S. on a false visa.
After going through the legal framework of deportation, we get to the data. The analysis was done on data supplied by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Included in the study were 12,036 listed deportees, sent back to Jamaica between 1997 and the first few months of the 2003 fiscal year. Among the nine pieces of information given about each deportee were date of birth, date of entry into the U.S., date returned to Jamaica and whether they had committed a crime in the U.S. (and if so, what kind and how many convictions).
CRITICAL BITS OF INFORMATION
The researchers devised a method to directly address three "critical bits of information", which directly address the matter of whether the U.S. is sending back their criminal finished products to the origin of the raw material, namely deportees age at time of arrival in the U.S., their age when deported and duration of stay 'up North'.
Nine research questions were put to the researchers, among them the nature of convictions for those deportees who had committed a crime in the U.S., and their methods of entry into the U.S., as well as the questions that would be answered by the three 'critical bits of information' they were able to track. However, two very important questions could not be answered, not through any fault of the US suppliers. These were if there were further criminality in Jamaica among the convicted deportees and how many in the dataset supplied are now in the Jamaican correctional system.
It would seem that if Jamaicans are to spout about deportees being responsible for crime in Jamaica (a Gleaner editorial, as well as KD Knight are cited) they will have to roll up their sleeves and start counting.
Extensive and graphic treatment is given to the analysis of the data. It is also stated that 3,308 persons were excluded from the data given; of this 508 were persons who popped up twice (yard man beat any system, no true?) and 3,300 had missing bits of information. It is clearly stated that including the cases "would not have changed the thrust of the findings reported here".
And those findings, after painstaking care to clarity is taken, (as expected) absolve the U.S. of deportee sins against Jamaica. The average age of convicted deportees on entering the U.S. is 23 years (so much for the 'grown in America' theory). They spent an average of 11.6 years in the U.S., with three quarters of them spending three to four years in U.S. prison in that time. A whopping 33 per cent were convicted for cocaine and a mere two for murder.
Deported: Volume 1 is an easy read, with the information, analysis and conclusions clearly presented.
For me, though, a song quote at the beginning of Deported: Volume 1 underscores the 'Made in the USA' nature of the publication. Folk singer Woody Guthrie is quoted from Deportees:
Good-bye to my Juan, good-bye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Marias
You won't have a name when you ride the big air-plane
And all they will call you is deportee....
But, some Buju Banton would have been so appropriate, as he growled in Deportee:
Tings change, now yu see sey life hard
Why yu neva sen yu money come a yard??
Bway get deport come dung inna one pants....
Hey, anybody want to do a study of how many guns recovered by the security forces came here from the U.S.?
