THIRTY YEARS ago, with Parliament, and Jamaicans broadly, similarly exercised about the issue of capital punishment, the advice of Dudley Thompson was to put the rope "where it belongs". Which was "under the necks" of convicted criminals.

The numbers, in absolute terms, are different, but, then as now, Jamaicans were frightened by the high and rising levels of crime, particularly murders. And the society was lurching around for solutions.

It was not surprising, in that context, that a hawkish stance on capital punishment was, as is still the case, a popular position to adopt. The assumption is that the fear of death among criminals, as a sort of reprisal, would lead to fewer homicides.

Dudley Thompson, then a senior member of the Michael Manley administration, missed a glaring contradiction in his own argument. He had celebrated the fact that the security forces over the past year had killed 22 of the 27 "most dangerous" criminals, which he stamped as "not a bad record" as they confronted the country's "number one plague".

Proxy justice

The point is that despite their efficiency in killing wanted men, criminal violence, including homicides, was on the rise in Jamaica, to the point that people were thrashing around for a response. Three decades later, capital punishment is effectively in abeyance, but annual police killings are in the region of 200, which some people equate to a proxy for the judicial process.

What it seems that we have learned from this piece of history is that we have learned nothing from history. The data continue to suggest that the number of homicides in Jamaica doubles every 10 years or so, and that the killing of suspected perpetrators by the agents of the state is no deterrent. And while the retention of capital punishment might satisfy people's lust for vengeance, it is vastly unlikely to have any perceptible impact on the number of murders in Jamaica.

The fact that Jamaica has one of the world's highest homicide rates is a result of a complex set of circumstances; not least of these, in our view, is that despite the skill of the constabulary in killing alleged gunmen, they are not terribly efficient at catching murderers. Even the police statistics say so. Fewer than half the murders here are 'cleared up', whose interpretation includes cases in which the suspects are killed by cops.

Constabulary needs fixing

The bottom line is that even if Jamaica went on a carnival of executions, perhaps two-thirds of the murderers would be unaffected. For they are never caught by the police, their cases are never brought to court, they are never prosecuted or convicted.

This debate, therefore, is largely about the soft option and sops to our consciences - to appear to be doing something rather than getting down to the hard job of fixing the constabulary so that it is capable of catching criminals and bringing them properly to justice. And improving the justice system so that it is fairer and quick. And fixing the economy and the social environment that breed criminality. And reforming a politics that accommodates the coercion of voters, the creation of 'garrisons' and allows murders at party conferences.

Dudley Thompson's stance of 1978, as Pearnel Charles' echo of 2008, is easy and seductive, but hardly addresses the problem and should be rejected by MPs.

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