When life hands you a bag of sour oranges
Perhaps in British Prime Minister David Cameron’s alarming announcement there’s an opportunity. He warns that his government is thinking of the mass release from British prisons of Jamaicans and other foreign nationals. And that he’ll be sending them back to their homelands to complete their sentences. Doubtless this would present an immense dilemma for Jamaica and a host of other struggling nations.
But if we were to think dynamically and imaginatively about this impending dilemma, we’d see in it, and then sieze, a tremendous new kind of possibility. There’s implicit truth, something powerfully redemptive, in the notion that when life hands you a bagful of sour oranges, you use them to make lemonade. If this thing is a fait accompli, a done deal (as I suspect it is), that in fact our forgotten people will be coming back to us in ever greater numbers, we ought then to have a reasonably good hand in shaping an “everybody wins” outcome.
We begin with the demoralising admission that our nation heads the list of the most murderous places on earth to live. And that we’ve produced, since Independence, two generations of youths who could just as easily slit your throat and make duppies of each other, with the same lack of regard – or equal delight – as in making babies. We also ought to be profoundly ashamed that other countries’ expensive jails and prison cells are filled with Jamaicans; that overseas lawmen have stuffed those cells with the surplus of unwanted people we somehow thought we’d got rid of when they migrated.
We’ve been desperately longing for our “brand name” to be associated only with the island’s amazing natural beauty, and with the names Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell and Bob Marley. But alas, that’s a far cry from reality. Life, or more precisely our desultory political development process, has handed us a different kind of fate, an altogether unlovely alternative brand name. It’s handed us an awful bagful of sour oranges: crime and criminality.
In a bind
Mr Cameron is in a bind. He says it’s costing his government, in straitened economic times, a hefty £38,000 (approximately $5.2 million ) to keep, every year, each of 900-plus Jamaican citizens behind bars. What he proposes doing about this, his “Jamaican crime problem”, is to send offenders back to Jamaica to complete their prison sentences. Oddly enough, this strikes me as a quintessential opportunity to make something useful, even profitable, out of an awful situation. Rather than waste time on theatrics and in pointless protestation, a hard-nosed, pragmatic Jamaican government would want to explore thoughtfully, critically (and without Trinidad & Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s unhinged loquacity), “What might there be in this thing for us?”
Prisons in the developed world are stable income generators. State and local jurisdictions across America unabashedly clamour and find ways to outdo and out-manoeuvre one another in bidding “wars” over having new multibillion-dollar prisons constructed and operated in their communities. The competition has grown particularly intense as once-thriving small towns struggle to survive, after manufactories have either locked up shop or relocated to cheap-labour locales around the globe.
And, like it or not, prisons are big business. Few entities on Wall Street have weathered the global economic downturn as well as the prison-for-profit industry. Both Britain and the United States have long contracted out specific custodial services to well-placed for-profit prison firms. Seasoned analysts rate the stock in the publicly traded prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CXW), from “Buy” to “Outperform”. CXW has market capitalisation of US$2.8 billion; it enjoyed last year a profit margin of 9.3 per cent, and gave back to investors a Return on Equity of 11 per cent – more than pioneering corporate giant General Electric. Simply put, there’s gold in them there prison “hills”.
The deal
Here, then, is the deal we should consider putting to Mr Cameron:
“You say it costs you £38,000 per year to house, feed and clothe a single prisoner? For a fraction of that, we can do the same here in Jamaica, without even factoring, to your additional advantage, exchange rate differentials. So, rather than going the morally untenable (we wouldn’t say “repugnant”) route of releasing into the streets of Kingston, Lagos, Georgetown, Accra or Johannesburg hordes of not-ready-for-society inmates (because that’s what in effect we’d see), why don’t you contract out to us, here in Jamaica, your entire foreign nationals prison operation? You’re currently seeing, aren’t you, Sir, that insufficiently thought-out and badly executed prisoner and “deportee” removal projects only reduces Britain’s stature in the world as a civilised and civilising nation?
“We’ve got lots of what environmentalists call “brown land” all over our capital city – land on which at one time we operated vibrant, productive industries and manufacturing, shops and stores, and downtown offices. Now they’re only burnt-out hulls. We can build on these lands – with a mere slice of the money you’d normally shell out to British construction firms – modern, humane facilities geared to the mission of restoration and human transformation. We could put to work building the facilities hundreds, if not thousands, of the already skilled deported migrants you and the Americans have also been sending back to us; those who now idly sit, Sir, on the docks of our bays.
“Sure, we the Jamaican people will in this arrangement be making more than a few lucrative bucks off our British friends – but at a cost way less than your government would normally be obligated to spend. Besides – most important – your decent, gracious image will remain intact. On the other hand, look at the impact this will have on us, on our image, our brand name: We’ll be known as (Oh God, please No, God!) a penal colony!
“Still, it will be a win-win outcome. You’ll be spared international ignominy, and it is likely that we could, in not-too-far-off years, turn out to be as successful as two earlier prison colonies: Australia and the US state of Georgia, with its alluring capital, Atlanta.”
Bernard Headley is Professor of Criminology at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
bernard.headley@uwimona.edu.jm