- Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer
Police officers remove family members from a murder scene, in Kingston, April 2005.

Bernard Headley, Contributor

Those of us who try to do serious research on the causes of crime, especially in high-crime Jamaica and the Caribbean, anxiously await public access to that Ministry of National Security study.

The study, that is, from which The Gleaner of September 13, 2006 (Deportees linked to crime') reports Minister of National Security Peter Phillips as having copiously cited in Parliament the day before.

I desperately tried the day following The Gleaner's coverage of the minister's presentation to get my hands on the purported study, but to no avail. Someone at the office of the Ministry of National Security, the point person there on deportee matters, my Department staff learned, at first said s/he was not aware of any such study. Then, in an abrupt turnaround, the person said the study hadn't yet been published; but, not to worry, as soon as it was, I'd receive a copy. (I've since gathered that the study next goes to Cabinet, before anyone outside of Government will be able to scrutinise it.) I'll stubbornly wait.

PARTICULAR INTEREST

I take particular interest in the study because of its ostensible central finding, as reported by the minister that "there is a direct statistical correlation between increases in deportation and increases in the country's [i.e., Jamaica's] murder rate".

But that's a curious finding, since the police have been telling us that murder rates have been going down; this while the numbers of deportees coming into the island have been going up. The trend would seem to suggest, then, that the greater the number of deportees, the lower the murder rate. But that wouldn't make sense, would it? Something would be intuitively and logically flawed in a model that would put forth such a thesis. Which, therefore, makes the point: simple statistical correlations generally say very little; at worst they are spurious. The two - phenomenal number of deportees and increase in murder - are not necessarily related.

The minister's reported "correlation" flies in the face of findings and conclusions that a UWI, Mona, research team and I reached two years ago, in a carefully developed, well-documented and widely available study, 'Deported: Entry and Exit Findings of Jamaicans Returned Home from the U.S., portions of which can be downloaded from the UWI, Mona, website.

From extensive quantitative analyses of U.S. reported data on deportees returned to the island over a roughly six-year period, we came to the conclusion that the American Congress and Executive (two of the three branches of the U.S. Government) have a lot to answer for in its present deportation practice - a conclusion that didn't win us any friends at the U.S. Embassy, nor in Washington, D.C.

We nonetheless discovered, and did point out, that sending back planeloads of Jamaican-born, but American raised violent criminals, who then become dispropor-tionately responsible for the country's horrendous crime problem, is not one of the "sins" of the Americans.

Included in the luckless massives sent back to us from America are, indeed, specimens of the rejects our unsympathetic society produced - persons we may have thought we had successfully off-loaded onto the shoulders of someone else: muggers and murderers, thieves and robbers, rapists and wife-beaters, drug traffickers and gang bangers; each having served varying types of U. S. imprisonment. But also among the forcibly returned have been undocumented workers and visa over-stayers, non-reporting green card holders and out-of status students, stowaways and "asylum seekers", people who got married under 'false pretence' and people with unpaid traffic tickets.

FURTHER CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT

From this disparate lot we must disentangle those likely to do, in Jamaica, actual, serious harm. According to a growing body of scholarly research done in the Caribbean, once back home, further criminal involvement is not the overwhelming likelihood among convicted deportees. In Trinidad & Tobago, for instance, criminally convicted deportees' rate of recorded involvement in further crime was negligible, when compared with that of convicts released locally: 9.5 per cent for deportees, against 67 per cent for locals.

We wonder, then, and given what we know about the parlous state of Jamaican law enforcement data on deportees, at Minister Phillips' assertion that "deported criminal offenders are convicted of crimes in Jamaica at approximately the same rate as local offenders" This he bases on a finding unearthed by his commissioned study. But how, exactly, was this finding unearthed?

A presumed finding does not, moreover, become received knowledge because the minister (or anyone in political or administrative authority) takes a liking to it. Research findings become new truths only after having undergone rigorous processes of open inspection and uncompromising peer review of verification and replication. This is epistemological canon that people with advanced research degrees ought reflexively to be acquainted with and care about.

We, the tax-paying Jamaican public, need to know a lot more, everything in fact, about this latest Ministry of National Security deportee study. (In another such study, done just five years ago, the ministry reported totally contrary findings and conclusions from what we are now being presented. What's changed since then?)

We need to know, first and foremost, who guided or was principally responsible for the present study? Telling us that it was the Planning Institute of Jamaica won't be enough. Who takes authorship for the study? Somebody with a name sat down and with pen and paper, and/or laptop, wrote stuff down. Who was that person? Was it someone with a known, trustworthy academic research record? What were the study's main methods? How, in other words, did the study author, or authors, go about finding out what they and Minister Phillips say they found?

My big fear, as a Jamaican living in Jamaica, is that if we keep wrongfully harassing in particular the Americans about them sending back violent criminals, they may indeed decide to start sending us some of the superthugs and mad-dog killers we bred back here, but whom the American prison system has so far kept safely locked away from us. But keep trucking this misguided stuff and the Americans may send back to us Vivian Blake, Colin Ferguson, Lee Boyd Malvo and some of our recent "extraditables" as well as a few, just a few, of the scar-faced assassins we turned loose on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Miami in the 1980s.

Bernard Headley is professor of criminology in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona.