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...their sentences in the United States landed at the Norman Manley International Airport, Kingston, after disembarking from a chartered flight. "They are all males," a spokesperson at the Criminal Investigative Bureau headquarters, downtown Kingston, told The Gleaner yesterday. By late afternoon, the majority of the deportees had been processed and released. The majority who returned yesterday were expelled from the United States.... Up to four months ago, the police said they were facing a legal obstacle in getting permits from the courts to properly monitor persons who have been deemed dangerous deportees (The Gleaner, 2005a).
Objects of Blame
HOMICIDE RATES IN JAMAICA, A NATION OF 2.7 MILLION PEOPLE, HAVE SINCE THE 1990s hovered in the vicinity of 40 to 45 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. At the end of calendar year 2005, the murder toll had exceeded 1,670 (which did not include the victims of police action), for an astounding rate of more than 60 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. This statistic compares rather unfavorably with large U.S. urban centers like New York and Chicago, which have homicide rates that have steadily numbered less than 15 per 100,000 over the last three years.
This soaring pattern of homicides places Jamaica among the top three countries in the world that experience the highest homicide rates. Alternating with Columbia and South Africa, Jamaica currently holds the dubious distinction as the "world's murder capital." Indeed, killings in Jamaica "have become almost as commonplace as simple larceny" (The Gleaner, 2005a).
Beset by this seemingly unrelenting destructive development, public discourse on crime in the island is now driven by bursts of terrified rage. One feature of this rage has been the tendency to blame the country's crime troubles on groups within the society that are least capable of offering any credible resistance. Thus, one notion steadfastly propagated in the media, and given official support, is that a key reason for the island's uncontrollable crime is the planeloads of "criminal deportees" being returned to the island from Great Britain, Canada, and especially the United States. In a lead editorial, the island's dominant newspaper, The Gleaner (2003a), flatly stated: "Between the system, the police, and the courts, deportees are being allowed to wreak havoc on the society and it is high time that citizens demand immediate implementation of whatever changes are necessary to get the situation under control." In these and other media treatments, deportees are portrayed as an indistinguishable lot of "rejects" sent back home to re-create for themselves disquieting, violent existences--in a land they departed years ago.
Prime Minister P.J. Patterson has characterized deportees as a criminal type. In a nationally televised broadcast, the prime minister identified the main targets of a "proactive" crime-control task force, the Crime Management Unit (CMU) he had established in September 2000, were "dons, the deportees, and other criminals." (1) The CMU would be able, Patterson said, "to move anywhere and anytime" in the greater Kingston area against all three. (2) Four years following the formation of the ill-fated CMU, Patterson would warn of the "mushrooming threats of narcotrafticking and violent crime to national growth and stability" in a speech to a group of overseas Jamaicans at the first National Diaspora Conference in Kingston. At the core of the twin "evils," the prime minister said, are deportees who have become drug kingpins.
Putting his own slant on the matter, the island's Commissioner of Police, Lucius Thomas, opined to a group of business leaders: "We have seen them [deportees] in the St. Andrew South Division la metropolitan Kingston police area], and it is no wonder that we see the increase in crime [there]" (quoted in The Gleaner, 2005b). The commissioner had not bothered to ponder that if two phenomena occur simultaneously, it does not follow that one caused the other.
The deportee phenomenon now also figures prominently in theoretical formulations of "threats" to regional security. Referring specifically to the Caribbean, Ivelaw Griffith (2004), one of the region's foremost political theoreticians, sees the deportee phenomenon as one aspect of a "local-global nexus" within a larger system of nontraditional threats to the security of small English-speaking Caribbean nation-states. "It is not merely the fact of deportation and the numbers that are troubling," he cautions. "Part of the challenge is the fact that deportees generally have a troubling criminal profile, with the capabilities and disposition to perpetrate crime in the new jurisdiction" (Ibid.: 36). The "troubling criminal profile" to which Griffith refers was likely developed in the home country, well before migration and eventual deportation. It is misleadingly referred to in the Jamaican setting as "the 'Bubba' Smith factor."
Before his violent death in July 2004, Oliver "Bubba" Smith was the head and criminal mastermind of the "One Order" gang, an extortion outfit based in Jamaica's old capital, Spanish Town. The police had also wanted him for several killings. Smith was one in a pool of 1,558 Jamaicans deported from the United States in 2002. He fell specifically in a well-defined group of 1,031 individuals (66.2% of all those deported that year) who were returned because they had been convicted of a felony while in the U.S. According to the "troubling criminal profile" line of reasoning, an individual like Smith represents a category of U.S.-taught deportees known to have a disproportionate effect on the crime rate of their receiving country.
Yet the trajectory of Smith's existence reveals a contrary reality: his hardened criminal profile was developed not in the U.S., but in his home country, Jamaica. Years before he left for the U.S., he was already at enmity with the Jamaican authorities. He had had numerous run-ins with the police and was well known to lawmen in and around Spanish Town, where he maintained a residence, and operated his extortion racket for more than eight years. He continued the extortion operation, police sources believe, during part of the time he spent in the U.S. At the time he left for the U.S. (with a false identity and a fraudulent passport), Smith was on bail for a shooting-with-intent charge in Jamaica. In the United States, he was convicted for a minor drug-related crime, for which U.S. authorities deported him, after mandatory time spent in the New York prison system.
Smith was 30 years of age when he departed for the U.S. By then, he was a seasoned, well-formed, made-in-Jamaica villain. He had gone north to "cool out," to escape the...
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