“When a gangbanger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd, because he feels someone disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do we need to punish that man for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there is a hole in his heart, one that government programmes alone may not be able to repair.”

 Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

 

Social intervention seems to be the new catchword for dismantling criminality in Jamaica. Given the failings of a mono-policing approach for many years, the intervention of state sponsored social intervention programmes in crime-ridden communities is a good thing. Social intervention however is not a panacea. It cannot fix the hole in the heart of the criminals roaming our streets. It will not fix the defective moral compass of many of our citizens.

Social intervention is neither to be confused with civic intervention, the indispensability of people-lead (rather than state-imposed) civicness and civility in transforming values, attitudes, behaviours, citizens’ sense of self, and collective responsibility. Social intervention as a crime strategy appears to, again, misguidedly relies solely on the intervention of the state, with limited participation by civil society from within the most crime ridden areas. Whereas social intervention provides alternatives to criminality, it will take a cultural revolution ‘from below’ constructed and lead and sustained by people within their own communities to enact the kind of transformation which will heal the society so far gone into social decay.