Headley

I pointed out in these pages on Sunday, January 14, that within the broad category of criminal or convicted deportees (not persons deported for simple immigration violations) are two types. One type, which constitutes the overwhelming majority, is of individuals convicted for sundry crimes, mostly drug offences, but also for crimes such as shoplifting and writing bad cheques. But, having little or no criminal history, they return to Jamaica posing little or no danger.

There are, however, a small number of deportees for whom the label 'deportee' is contextually misleading. These are home-grown, returned criminals, who went up to London or New York as grown, adult men, while remaining well connected back in Jamaica. They do not return dispossessed or uprooted, as do the majority of deportees. Rather, the returned criminal comes back to gang and other networks (sometimes in need of repair) that are predisposed to waste, death and destruction.

It's a distinction that Deputy Commissioner of Police Mark Shields seems to agree on. Making this kind of substantive differentiation calls into question any presupposed linear relationship (or "correlation") between an absolute number of deportees and increase in serious crime, as does the currently parliamentary-tabled Ministry of National Security report, 'A Study on Criminal Deportation'.

Template

I argued in the 2005 book, Deported, and in a Sunday Gleaner article sometime ago ('Made in Jamaica: A discourse on deportees', October 17, 2004), that the individual whose life story is the template for the returned criminal was Spanish Town's 'Bubba' Smith. (In the interest of full disclosure, in 2003-04 the U.S. Embassy in Kingston awarded me a grant of US$10,000, plus a small publication supplement, to analyse three CD-ROMS of Department of Homeland Security spreadsheet data on U.S. deportations to Jamaica. The money was divided between two research postgraduates, a copy editor, a local publisher, and me. The product of that effort is the aforementioned book, which has been incorporated into required course material and copies donated to institutional libraries and public agencies.)

Oliver 'Bubba' Smith was one in a pool of 1,558 Jamaicans forcibly returned home from the United States in 2002. He fell specifically in a well-defined group of 1,031 (66.2 per cent of the number of individuals deported that year) who were returned because they had been convicted of a crime in the United States.

But Smith had had numerous run-ins with Jamaican law enforcement prior to his sojourn in America. He was a known entity to the Spanish Town police, where he maintained a residence and operated, for more than eight years, an extortion racket. American immigration authorities say, "There is no evidence that Smith was ever granted a visa to enter the United States." Yet, with corrupt official assistance, he was able to, in January 1994. He entered at Texas' San Antonio Port of Entry but made his way up to New York, where he had family. Smith was 30 years old (no babe in the woods) when he arrived in America. He left Jamaica while on bail for a shooting-with-intent charge. In the U. S., he was convicted for a drug-related crime; for which, under New York's mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, he was given prison time. On his release, U.S. immigration authorities deported him.

Return to Jamaica

On his return to Jamaica, Smith "observed", according to the Spanish Town police, that youths he left on the street "were not acting as family". They were loosely connected and "constantly warring with each other". He further noted that one gang, the 'Clans', controlled most of the city's lucrative extortion operations. So he got to work. First, he brought into 'One Order', on his side of town, disparate and warring criminal gangs. This gave birth to his 'One Order' gang, a centrally organised criminal outfit. The 'One Order' motif would become, according to Smith's police rap sheet, the driving force for uniting disaffected, crime-prone communities "under one leadership in order to challenge the Clans for control of the extortion racket, especially at the Spanish Town Bus Terminus".

Next, Smith and his gang coerced businessmen into paying protection money. This "did not go down well with the opposing Clans gang". Pitched battles between the two gangs erupted on the streets of the city in the early weeks of summer 2004, shutting down for hours at a time much of the city's commerce. Through methods like these Smith would go on to expand his criminal enterprise across greater Spanish Town and into the outskirts of Kingston.

Smith ran out of trusted friends and time on Monday night, July 12, 2004. He was gunned down in the street, shot five times with an AK 47 assault rifle. At the time of his death, Jamaican law enforcement wanted him for murder, shooting, and extortion, several of which he allegedly committed or participated in before he went up to America. Into the second week past his lavish funeral, the police counted 17 murders they said were directly attributable to the Smith killing.

It's people like 'Bubba' Smith, who merely happened to be deported, in whom Mr. Shields is "most interested". Could the 17 murders that followed Smith's killing be attributed, in some indirect way, to a 'deportee'? Not one bit; because Smith having been to, and deported from America was no more responsible for his criminal formation than was the airline ticket agent who handed him his boarding pass. Smith was the quintessential made-in-Jamaica man of violence. A mere footnote to the course of his hectic, travelled life was that he also got deported from America.

Those Murder Figures

Lastly, despite our best and modestly productive efforts, 2006 was still a horrendous murder year. The police report a year-end total of more than 1,300 murders, which places us, yet again, in the top tier of 'murder countries'. Now might be good time for Mr. Shields, or perhaps Ms. Annmarie Barnes, the Government's in-house 'consultant criminologist', to answer in simple numbers the question I posed in these pages a month ago: Of the number of individuals arrested and booked for last year's murders, or for the previous year, how many of them were deportees of any type; if not for murder, how about for robbery, rape, assault, shooting?

Only when we have that kind of factual information can we make empirically informed judgments about general deportee involvement in ongoing serious crimes. What the nation needs first, as it tries to come to terms with this its most crippling problem, are truth and truthfulness.

Bernard Headley is professor of criminology in the Department of Sociology, Psychology & Social Work, University of the West Indies, Mona. Email: bernard.headley@uwimona.edu.jm.