CRIMINAL COURT judge and television personality Judge Joe Brown has accomplished much in in 61 years. He was the first African-American prosecutor in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, and a judge on the state criminal court of Shelby County in the same state.

His syndicated television show aired on CBS, is rated in the top-10 programmes on the network and his contract extends to 2013. While on the bench, Judge Brown earned a reputation for his novel sentencing method, which gained remarkable results. A man of strong and controversial views, he candidly addressed that issue, capital punishment and more in an interview with Lifestyle Editor Barbara Ellington last Thursday.

Judge Brown, who will publish his book titled Observations next year, is in the island as the keynote speaker at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts' graduation ceremony yesterday, and at the colleges's fund-raising banquet at the Hilton Kingston hotel tomorrow.

I read where you give back to the community in the form of public service. What would you say is the most challenging aspect of your work with young people as you try to get them to remain on the straight and narrow?

Overcoming the fact that too many of our boys have no father around to give them their 'man training' and they have too much woman in them. Parenting needs women and men. But in the US, it's become politically correct for strong, independent women to have children and raise them without fathers. They seem to think they can do it all by themselves, but it doesn't work.

If we don't give boys the appropriate male rituals and establish the appropriate male protocols, then they tend to be cannibalistic and women don't have any idea how to put those manly qualities into boys. They need a man to do this, even if he has to beat it into them.

But they can't beat where you come from, you will lock those parents up!

I will not lock a man up for doing what he has to do with his son; I have never done that.

On that note, I also read that while on the bench, you used novel sentencing methods for non-violent offenders, but the information did not say exactly what you did. Share some of those with readers.

My novel sentencing methods are the tip of the iceberg. What I was trying to do was get someone's attention so I could focus on what I wanted to do. People need to be socialised to develop a work ethic necessary for life.

For most of history, women have been more violent than men in their daily application: Women can throw crockery, cry, shout, but boys have been told be be in control and laid-back. You hear about the manly art of self-defence, no hitting below the belt, the mandatory eight-count chivalry and fight like a man.

Boys now wear bling because they have no male role models, so they listen to their 41-year-old aunt in their mind. They go around dressing gaudily because they are thinking like girls, not men. It compares to how white slave owners kept slaves. The boys' minds are enslaved to behave like girls, and the girls, like they are boys. So boys don't take charge of anything and they think living off the women is all right.

Rap videos make some people upset because of the raw sexuality, but it's not a sexual thing. The lyrics represent what these boys' mothers and grandmothers look like at home. Mama is about 31 and she's still playing hoochie, still having babies, while grandmother is about 44, also still having babies. These are the images he has. These contribute to making men sissies.

One of the conversations I have heard on American television stations since the Obama victory is that now American black women will see in Michelle Obama another ideal of their race to emulate because of years of them being stereotyped as loud, angry and overall negative.

Yes, they have been, but they have not done anything to counter that image and it seems to have been popularised because it sells. Some black entertainment icons perpetrate that. The voice of the village that would have something to say about raising children has essentially been dysfunctional. Our news and entertainment media have been a disgrace. Those running the news are astonishingly ignorant for what they have elected to do; they are more concerned with their make-up.

It's all about the sound byte when the process took years of study. I met Walter Kronkite and Ed Bradley and these were very educated men, walking encyclopaedias. Nowadays, you run into reporters and they know more about make-up than what's going on in the world.

Let's get back to your senten-cing methods, what were some of these?

I would take a perpetrator in a burglary matter who did not get too much time. I'd let the victims go visit the defendant accompanied by deputies and a bailiff with a court order, look at his property of approximate value to what was stolen and check if it was stolen. If anyone else had a similar claim, we did the same and they took back what was theirs.

I made some of them do homework, like read the autobiography of Malcolm X and return with reports about it till I was satisfied that they had read it.

I would make young women who had been sentenced go to the library and look up the names of their children and come back and tell me what they meant. Sometimes they came back troubled because they could not find the meaning of some names. I pointed out that every name had a meaning, even if it was a diffe-rent language, so failure to find a meaning meant that they gave their children names that had no meaning.

Remnants of slavery

So the children had the wrong label to start life! If no one has taught you to think, you are at a disadvantage. We still suffer to a great extent from the remnants of slave culture in the United States. The whole country revolves around having tried to retain it or get away from the fact that it existed. The unfortunate side effect is that we had a movement in the '60s embraced by certain radical feminists who determined that the black woman was the ideal type for them. They did not pick the strong, educated black women. They took the under-educated class as a role model.

They looked at the sister down in the hood who seemed to be in charge of her men; they wanted to be badly in charge; they picked that model. So, what you have at the top is rich, white females saying you don't need a husband to start a family, just have a family and maybe later, marry a lifemate.

Homosexual couples

In the United States now we have a thing where homosexual couples are trying to marry and adopt children. And you have many people having children out of wedlock. It destroys the family.

What are your thoughts on the recent demonstrations by the homosexual community regarding their right to marry?

It's their business, but I don't understand why they need to marry. Marriage is a fundamental human organisational and reproductive unit. It has all sorts of uses. It's the way humans raise children, and you need a mother and father to properly do it and it's already in danger. So, one more nail in the coffin is something that need not be put there. Surprisingly, there were many gays who were not for gay marriage anyway. They always say why not just sign a civil contract.

Would you support civil contracts over marriages?

I don't care. The marriage bit has too many things to do with inheritance, establishing extended family units, and lots more.

I know of a fertility clinic where less than five per cent of the clients are married people with reproductive complications: 43 per cent were lesbian couples trying to get pregnant and the other 52 per cent were straight females who wanted to have a child without having a husband.

We have a problem in the United States where in the largest 50 cities in America over the last 25 years, their live birth rate has been almost 78 per cent illegitimate.

Where do you stand on the issue of capital punishment?

I have signed death warrants and the penalty does absolutely nothing to promote public safety. It is an incentive to commit murder because when you have despair, you want to kill yourself but you don't have the nerve, so you put yourself in harm's way, hoping someone will do it for you.

Do you feel any remorse or have any sleepless nights when you sign a death warrant?

No, I have none at all. I have seen people killed two feet in front of me, so I look at it all as a sort of post-natal abortion or population control. Most of the families who are aggrieved for having lost a loved one to crime take the view that nothing the law does will bring them back. Some don't care whether the right person was caught, they just want someone to die. Many times, the wrong person is sitting on death row for a number of reasons.

In that case, what do you think of the O.J. Simpson verdict?

It was one of the most ill-prepared cases I have ever seen go to trial. It was an incompetently tried case and Marsha Clarke and Chris Darden, for the state of California, are embarrassments to the legal profession. In fact, a lot of professors use the tapes of that trial as examples of how not to do it. They (Darden and Clarke) were obnoxious, ignorant, ill-prepared and very unlearned in what they were doing.

Continues in tomorrow's GLEANER.