‘Hanging by Invitation: Capital Punishment, The Carceral Archipelago and Escalating Homicide Rates in the Caribbean’

Biko Agozino

Professor of Sociology

The University of the West Indies

St. Augustine

Trinidad and Tobago

ABSTRACT:

The escalating rate of violent crime in the Caribbean has prompted calls for the resumption of capital punishment as an appropriate response. This paper reviews the philosophical debates and statistical evidence of the effects of previous executions on the rates of homicide and concludes that the role of the Privy Council in permitting capital punishment in the Caribbean allows us to critically reflect on the theory of industrialization by invitation that was attributed to Sir Arthur Lewis. A comparative analysis of evidence from other parts of the world would be used to present a case for the abolition of capital punishment in the Caribbean.

Introduction:

On reading about the theory of unlimited supply of labour, I was puzzled because the population of the entire Caribbean is less than that of one major city in Nigeria. It was only after hearing Norman Girvan’s 2008 Nobel Laureate Celebrations lecture on Lewis that I understood the context of the theory – it was developed with South East Asia in mind and there is no doubt that overpopulation is more of a concern there than in the Caribbean. Yet, it is clear that Lewis generalized the theory to the Caribbean, leading Lloyd Best and others to dub it a theory of industrialization by invitation. Girvan (2005:200) makes this generalization clearer when he stated that ‘Lewis rested the case for industrialization on the over-population of the islands.’

My concern with the theory is not exclusively to do with the Caribbean but with a generalized concern that wherever it is believed that there is a surplus population in history, the response of policy makers is not always to try and create more opportunities to utilize the surplus human resources more humanely. Rather the tendency is for policies to be developed to cull the population either through population control, war, enslavement, disease, genocide, transportation or through mass incarceration of the surpluses as the theory of Malthus clearly implied. Karl Marx summarized this tendency in his critique of Adam Smith’s comments on overpopulation in his (Marx’s) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that were first translated into English by CLR James as follows: ‘The surplus will have to die!’

Strange as it may seem, this was the reaction of Marcus Garvey (1987) to people who accept an inferiority complex as clipped in Damian Marley’s Welcome to Jamrock: ‘You race of cowards, if you cannot do what other nations have done, what other races have done, then you had better die!’ Mark Figueroa (2008) made a related remark at his Lewis 2008 Nobel Laureate Celebration Lecture when he suggested that Lewis’ mother was the one who taught him that whatever Europeans can do, Africans can do too. I told Mark afterwards that I had wanted to ask him if Lewis believed everything his mother told him or if he disagreed with any aspect of this advice that Frantz Fanon (1963) would have dismissed as the illusion of catching up with a monstrous Europe? For instance, since Europeans enslaved and colonized the world for hundreds of years, should we Africans aim to do the same? I am suggesting that the idea of unlimited supply of labour is suspect and should not be maintained because of its ideological collateral damages in the hands of agents of social control who are happy to copy the genocidal examples of European modernity while apparently shunning the positive fruits of the Enlightenment. Given the threats of the AIDS pandemic globally, we cannot afford the luxury of thinking that there is a surplus human population anywhere especially given that the people more likely to be seen as surpluses are also by some coincidence the ones that are more prone to HIV infection today just as they are the ones most likely to be sentenced to death and executed in jurisdictions that retain the death penalty in response to relatively high homicide rates and public outcry to fight fire with fire.

In this paper, I will review the theory of unlimited supply of labour and comment on its critics and followers. Then I will review the theory of Punishment and Social Structure by Rusche and Kirchheimer to highlight a concern in criminology that surplus populations tend to be wasted rather than employed gainfully. Against the theoretical background, I will examine whether there is evidence of correlations between high rates of imprisonment and the death penalty and rates of unemployment in the Caribbean. In conclusion, I will call for more democratic ways of dealing with social crisis in the region and globally with lessons for economic development and social control based on evidence from social research to which more funding should be allocated.

Lewis on Unlimited Supply of Labour:

The essay of Lewis (1954) starts by announcing that it is written in the classical tradition based on an assumption that there is a consensus from Smith to Marx that there is unlimited supply of labour for industry as an engine for capital accumulation. My suspicion is that Smith and Marx would disagree on what is to be done with the surplus labour – to alienate it or to invest it but Lewis did not make this difference clear in his essay. Rather, he announced that in the neoclassical era, economists were misled by Keynes into dropping the assumption that there was an unlimited supply of labour in Europe and shifted their attention to prices and income distribution as the explanation for economic growth. No word about the very Keynesian US Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of the post-war economies of Europe and Japan with grants, not with the wages, taxes and credits that Lewis seemed to favour as planning tools.

According to Lewis, while the assumption of a limited supply of labour was no longer applicable to Europe, the original assumption that labour was unlimited in supply was still applicable to Asia. Keynes General Theory was noted as reviving interest in the assumption that there is unlimited supply of labour, but also unlimited supply of land and capital. In elaborating the theory, Lewis makes exception for Western European economies and some African and South American economies where certain kinds of labour could be said to be scarce. My question is whether we could read any meaning into the decline in the assumption of unlimited supply of labour in Europe at a time that Lewis was advocating such a theory for Asia – did the assumption decline because Europe was progressively treating labour more humanely compared to the situation in the colonies where workers were still being treated as disposable God’s Bits of Wood, the title of Sembene Ousmane’s semi-autobiographical novel about a Senegalese rail workers’ strike? Lewis cites declining population growth rates in Europe as one of the reason why the assumption of unlimited supply of labour no longer applied there but by citing the theory of Malthus in this regard, he reinforced the concern that population control policies are implied in the theory of unlimited supply of labour. This concern is not answered by the definition of unlimited supply of labour offered by Lewis (1954):

In the first place, an unlimited supply of labour may be said to exist in those countries where population is so large relatively to capital and natural resources, that there are large sectors of the economy where the marginal productivity of labour is negligible, zero, or even negative.

I wonder if the negligible, zero or even negative marginal productivity of labour when assumed by planners would encourage them to treat such workers humanely or regard them as clogs in the wheel of economic growth? The surprising thing as that this category of surplus labour is applied, not to the unemployed who is seeking work, but to the petty trader, the casual labourer or the rural small-holding farmer who have survived being proletarianized completely. Lewis goes on to comment on the assumption that domestic servants are often unproductive ‘burdens on the purse’ of their middle class employers while office messengers are dismissed as making only negligible contributions to business establishments. There is no hint here that these are some of the most exploited workers who are often overworked and underpaid. Although his argument that creating waged employment for women is one of the ways to increase national wealth is correct, Lewis somehow concluded that the work that women do at home is not gainful employment. Lewis appears to be aware of this fact that belief in the existence of unlimited supply of labour coincides with inhumane treatment of labour:

Thus, the owners of plantations have no interest in seeing knowledge of new techniques or new seeds conveyed to the peasants, and if they are influential in the government, they will not be found using their influence to expand the facilities for agricultural extension. They will not support proposals for land settlement, and are often instead to be found engaged in turning the peasants off their lands. (Cf. Marx on “Primary Accumulation”). This is one of the worst features of imperialism, for instance. The imperialists invest capital and hire workers; it is to their advantage to keep wages low, and even in those cases where they do not actually go out of their way to impoverish the subsistence economy, they will at least very seldom be found doing anything to make it more productive. In actual fact the record of every imperial power in Africa in modern times is one of impoverishing the subsistence economy, either by taking away the people's land, or by demanding forced labour in the capitalist sector, or by imposing taxes to drive people to work for capitalist employers (Lewis, 1954).

This is a clear indication that Lewis was aware that assumptions of unlimited supply of labour do not always go hand in hand with efforts to develop the human capital gainfully but often lead to neglect or mass oppression of such excess supply of labour. Since this paper is not focused on the economic theory of Lewis but on the social control implications of his assumption, the paper will now proceed by considering criminological theories that have tackled similar problems of surplus labour. It is interesting to note that Lewis was writing at the height of the Eugenics movement and yet he gave so much attention to Malthus and his questions about how to curb human population growth. He made this clear in Racial Conflict and Economic Development when he wrote that ‘Fast population growth eats up resources….The gap between the rich and the poor countries will not start to narrow until the poor countries get their flood of population under control’ (Lewis, 1985: 117). Unfortunately, flooding is associated with natural disasters and sometimes blamed on poor maintenance of drainage in the Caribbean and not used to refer to human beings as such. George Bush senior as US Ambassador to the United Nations was clear about what needed to be done to the so-called surplus populations:

The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world's fertility. (Bush, 1973: vii-viii.)

In the paper, ‘Unemployment in Developing Areas’, Lewis distanced himself from the population curb advocacy by stating that; ‘Population pressure is not a primary cause of unemployment. Countries with high population pressure learn over the centuries how to provide some work for everybody’ (Lewis, 1967: 1022). However, creating jobs for everyone is not entirely inconsistent with genocidal practices as Horace Campbell reminds us in his ‘Notes and Comments’ where, without reference to Lewis, he challenged The University of the West Indies colleagues to be more critical of the ideas of European modernity that were passed down to us from the past because the same ideas were used to support the genocidal trans Atlantic slavery of our people (Campbell, 2005: 161). This is similar to the critique of modernity by Zygmunt Bauman (1989) who argued that the Nazi holocaust was based on the ideal rational bureaucracy of Max Weber but there was nothing in rationalism to prevent the emergence of the holocaust nor is there anything in a system of thought that privileges rationalism over compassion that would help us to resist a system like fascism when it (re)emerges.

As an ‘anti-imperialist’ development economist who was interested in testing theories and applying them to problems of economic development (Girvan, 2005), Lewis would be familiar with this kind of critical testing of his theory through an application to the field of criminology although he did not directly address this implication of his work. Fortunately, there exists a classic in criminology that attempted to account for the treatment of surplus populations by social control agents prior to the classic essay by Lewis. That publication by Rusche and Kirchheimer will now be summarized and compared with what Girvan (2005) called the more optimistic view of Lewis.

Punishment and Social Structure by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939)

The thesis here is that ‘Every system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships’ (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939: 5). They argue that different penal systems are variables that are associated with ‘phases of economic development’. They admit that certain forms of punishment are retained from phase to phase. Using the example of transportation as a form of punishment, they report that Spain and Portugal were using this method as early as the fifteenth century but that ‘England’ was the first ‘country’ to introduce systematic use of transportation to service a growing empire (England is not a country, the UK is).

The Vagrancy Act of 1597 legalized the deportation of rogues to places ‘beyond the seas’. Condemned prisoners who were strong enough were allowed commutation of the death penalty in return for transportation and a limited period of penal slavery from which some of them rose to become wealthy in their own rights. Between 1717 and 1775, the Old Bailey alone sent at least 10,000 to North America. They differed from enslaved Africans because theirs was not really seen as punishment since it afforded them a raise in status and higher standard of living than they ever had in their own country but also they were hired for a period of servitude and not sold like chattel with rights over their children as property of the ‘owner’. Virginia had 2,000 enslaved Africans and about 6000 white servants in 1671 but by 1708 there were 12,000 enslaved Africans and fifty years later, 120,156 partly due to the practice of human husbandry. The Colonists in America later found the system of penal servitude unproductive and stated in their declaration of independence that they would not take ‘British refuse’ anymore. The authors suggest that the relative ease of the rehabilitation of the convicts who were transported to an improved social condition ‘proves conclusively that the categories good and bad, honest and criminal, are strictly relative’ (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939: 58-62). Maybe they are not always relative but it does suggest that punishment in the community and the creation of more legitimate opportunities to raise statuses of the ex-convicts would be more successful than incarceration especially if the society is seen as having limited supply of labour.

Rusche and Kirchheimer went on to argue that ‘The early form of the modern prison was bound up with the manufacturing houses of correction’ to which able-bodied convicts were leased according to the needs of the leasers and not according to the need to reform the offender. Du Bois identified the convict labour system as being partly responsible for the over-representation of African Americans in the criminal justice system at the end of enslavement. Rusche and Kirchheimer argue that while the poor bore the brunt of punishment the rising bourgeoisie was preoccupied with the formulation of substantive law to guarantee their emerging rights. Quoting Beccaria’s critique of the death penalty, they interpret it as a precaution that it would not be used against the rising bourgeoisie who saw life as a form of inalienable private property (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939: 76). Citing the Fascist and Nationalist Socialist penal policies that they had both fled and also with reference to post-war policies, they pessimistically conclude that:

‘So long as the social consciousness is not in a position to comprehend and act upon the necessary connection between a progressive penal program and progress in general, any project for penal reform can have but doubtful success, and failures will be attributed to the inherent wickedness of human nature rather than to the social system. … The futility of severe punishment and cruel treatment may be proven a thousand times, but so long as society is unable to solve its social problems, repression, the easy way out, will always be accepted (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939: 206).

Unlimited Supply of Labour and Punishment in Trinidad and Tobago.

Most of those who have examined the history of surplus labour tend to agree with Rusche and Kirchheimer that a social system that views parts of its population as surpluses would tend to identify the poor as the surpluses and would more likely move to repress the surpluses instead of mobilizing them for economic development. This could be regarded as one more complication of the theory of unlimited supply of labour by Lewis who was optimistic that the capitalist sector would absorb the surplus labour released from the subsistence sector, provided that the country invests in education of the labour force and that there are tax and credits incentives to employers. In this section, the paper will briefly see if there is any association between murder, narcotics seizures, the death penalty and prison rates in Trinidad and Tobago.

First of all, the paper looks at the relationships between murder and death penalty figures. Please note that the numbers of executions are few and far between due to the infrequency of the execution of this sentence and so the missing values in the zero years may be affecting the computed correlations. The correlation appears to be intuitive in the sense that it appears to show a negative correlation suggesting that if the number of executions is increased, then the murder rate would drop and vice versa! Supporters of the death penalty would say that they told us so but they should be careful what they wish for. In other words, the correlation also suggests that about three times out of ten, if the murder rate increases, the number of executions would also decline. That is counter-intuitive but actually factual in the sense that the death penalty is rarely used even by jurisdictions that authorize it the most, compared to other forms of punishment.

Murder	Executed via Death Penalty
Pearson Correlation	Murder	1.000	-.348
Executed via Death Penalty	-.348	1.000
Sig. (1-tailed)	Murder	.	.009
Executed via Death Penalty	.009	.
N	Murder	46	46
Executed via Death Penalty	46	46

Table 1: Correlation between murder and the number of executions.

Closer to the theory of the unlimited supply of labour, we see also a negative correlation between murder and unemployment rate but that would be counter intuitive too. It suggests that as unemployment rates rise, the number of murders would fall and that; as the number of murders rise, the unemployment rates would fall. Perhaps it is not so counterintuitive if killing more poor people reduces the unemployment rates but it is not clear how the reduction of the unemployment rates could lead to increased number of murders by about the same proportion as the relationship between numbers of executions and numbers of homicide.

Murder	Unemployment Rate
Pearson Correlation	Murder	1.000	-.318
Unemployment Rate	-.318	1.000
Sig. (1-tailed)	Murder	.	.030
Unemployment Rate	.030	.
N	Murder	36	36
Unemployment Rate	36	36

Table 2: Correlation of Murder and unemployment rates.

This might be evidence that both murder and unemployment rates, just as we saw with executions and murder rates, are not causally related, only correlated. They may be subject to other causal factors such as the requirements of the dual economy of Lewis or the social system of Rusche and Kirchheimer. The paper suggests that what is the causal factor is the unequal access to power between the people involved, a political factor that both approaches broached but did not fully account for in their relatively economisticaly deterministic emphases of both works on economic development and social control.

Prison Population	Narcotics
Prison Population	Pearson Correlation	1	.639(**)
Sig. (2-tailed)	.	.008
Sum of Squares and Cross-products	53148989.909	1507922.250
Covariance	1236023.021	100528.150
N	44	16
Narcotics	Pearson Correlation	.639(**)	1
Sig. (2-tailed)	.008	.
Sum of Squares and Cross-products	1507922.250	1879450.000
Covariance	100528.150	110555.882
N	16	18

Table 3: Correlation between prison population and narcotics seizures

The above table shows a strong positive relationship between prison populations and narcotics seizures that can only be expected given what we know about the impacts of the war on drugs on a carceral society. The response to this could be to congratulate the protective services for helping to lock up some of the ‘garbage’ that pollute the peace of the law-abiding citizens. This paper will argue that we know enough about harm reduction to advocate a different response to narcotics that would be more effective in reducing prison populations, narcotics seizures and possibly homicide numbers in the near future. To examine these variables more closely, I collaborated with a colleague, who contributed to the following analysis and commentary:

A Regression Analysis of Time Series

When looking at the data set, we find the necessity to address the following three issues. The general form for an ARIMA model is shown below:

Z(t) = V Mp Z(t-p) + U(t) – V Nq U(t-q)

where Z(t) is the transformed, standardized flow at time t

Z(t-p) are values of Z(t) lagged p time steps

_p are the autoregressive coefficients

_(t) are the error or residual terms

_q are the moving average coefficients

_(t-q) error terms lagged p timesteps

1. Serial Correlations (Autocorrelations)

The first concern with time series data in a regression model should be the issue of serial correlations or autocorrelations ― the correlations between the neighboring error terms (or “residuals” as estimates of the “true” error terms) over one or more time periods apart. To conduct a standard regression analysis (“Ordinary Least Squares” or OLS), the assumption of “no autocorrelations” with the error terms should be satisfied. Otherwise, the final results would be either overestimations or underestimations of the real population parameters we are interested in.

In this regression model, “murder” is classified as the dependent variable. We theorize that the “murder rate” in a specific year, for instance in 1994, should be the function of the independent variables (“violent crimes,” “narcotics,” “prison population,” “executions,” “unemployment rate”) in that year.

However, our time series data may also reflect another “reality” ― the “murder rate” in 1994 could also be a function of the “murder rate” in 1993 in addition to the impacts of the defined independent variables in 1994. In other words, there could be a correlation between the “murder rate” in 1994 and the murder rate in 1993, a first-order autocorrelation. Or, furthermore, in the meantime, the “murder rate” in 1994 could also be a function of the “murder rate” in 1992 in addition to the impacts of the defined independent variables in 1994 and the murder rate in 1993. This is a second-order autocorrelation. Although we can suppose a third-order, a fourth-order, or higher order autocorrelations theoretically, a third-order or higher order autocorrelation is uncommon practically.

Is this the case with our data set? To check whether or not an autocorrelation exits in the time series of the dependent variable “murder,” we can use SPSS 16.0 to run a standard regression analysis with the Durbin-Watson test for detecting autocorrelation. The following is part of the printout:

Model Summaryb
Model	R	R Square	Adjusted R Square	Std. Error of the Estimate
1	.900a	.811	.782	39.778
a. Predictors: (Constant), Year, Unemployment Rate, Narcotics, Executed via Death Penalty, Prison Population, Violent Crimes
b. Dependent Variable: Murder

Change Statistics	Durbin-Watson
R Square Change	F Change	df1	df2	Sig. F Change
.811	27.832	6	39	.000	1.192
a. Predictors: (Constant), Year, Unemployment Rate, Narcotics, Executed via Death Penalty, Prison Population, Violent Crimes
b. Dependent Variable: Murder

Model	Unstandardized Coefficients	Standardized Coefficients	t	Sig.	95% Confidence Interval for B
B	Std. Error	Beta	Lower Bound	Upper Bound
1	(Constant)	244.596	48.209	5.074	.000	147.085	342.107
Violent Crimes	-.077	.030	-.534	-2.536	.015	-.139	-.016
Narcotics	-.245	.037	-.588	-6.535	.000	-.321	-.169
Prison Population	.027	.013	.339	2.007	.052	.000	.053
Executed via Death Penalty	1.721	2.214	.083	.777	.442	-2.757	6.199
Unemployment Rate	-2.455	2.324	-.100	-1.056	.297	-7.155	2.246
Year	5.919	1.004	.934	5.898	.000	3.889	7.950
a. Dependent Variable: Murder

It seems that the model is relatively good. The R2 is .811 and adjusted R2 is .782 which represents the Proportionate Reduction of Error (PRE) we would expect if we tried to predict the dependent variable (murder rate) based on our knowledge of the rates of the independent variables. However, according to the t ratios, two independent variables ― “Unemployment Rate” and “Executed” ― do not show significant impacts on “murder” as the dependent variable. Surely, as the paper stated earlier, the correlation between “murder” and “Narcotics” is negative but the problem of the “missing values” is present. Moreover, the Durbin-Watson statistic is 1.192 which indicates the existence of a positive autocorrelation in the time series of “murder.” But a t ratio of less than two is indicative of a lack of statistical significance.

The existence of an autocorrelation does “discount” the merit of a regular regression analysis for this data set. To check the pattern of the detected autocorrelation, a test of autocorrelations (AFC) and partial autocorrelations (Partial AFC or PAFC) with SPSS 16.0 was ran. The printout is as follows:

Autocorrelations
Series: Murder
Lag	Autocorrelation	Std. Errora	Box-Ljung Statistic
Value	df	Sig.b
1	.827	.143	33.588	1	.000
2	.667	.141	55.900	2	.000
3	.446	.140	66.104	3	.000
4	.328	.138	71.760	4	.000
5	.217	.136	74.297	5	.000
6	.158	.135	75.671	6	.000
7	.113	.133	76.388	7	.000
8	.100	.131	76.971	8	.000
9	.113	.129	77.727	9	.000
10	.119	.128	78.589	10	.000
11	.121	.126	79.521	11	.000
12	.112	.124	80.333	12	.000
13	.086	.122	80.823	13	.000
14	.044	.120	80.955	14	.000
15	.019	.118	80.980	15	.000
16	.003	.117	80.981	16	.000
a. The underlying process assumed is independence (white noise).
b. Based on the asymptotic chi-square approximation.

Partial Autocorrelations
Series: Murder
Lag	Partial Autocorrelation	Std. Error
1	.827	.147
2	-.056	.147
3	-.288	.147
4	.186	.147
5	-.030	.147
6	-.033	.147
7	.053	.147
8	.032	.147
9	.073	.147
10	-.028	.147
11	-.005	.147
12	.021	.147
13	-.064	.147
14	-.050	.147
15	.061	.147
16	.006	.147

Both tables and figures of plots display that a second-order autocorrelation exists in the time series of “murder” and a model of ARIMA (2, 0, 0), Arima is actually also the name of a town near our St. Augustine campus, should be suitable for accounting for the existing autocorrelation in order to run a fitting regression model of time series. We also used “PAST” ― a data analysis package ― to re-check the pattern of the time series for “murder.” The result is the same.

2. Regression Model of Time Series

Regrettably, at this moment, SPSS 16.0 cannot run a fitting regression model of time series through a model of ARIMA (2, 0, 0). Unlike those earlier editions, a new edition of regular SPSS package (such as SPSS 16.0) no longer includes some important features such as “Time Series ARIMA.” Perhaps for a consideration of profits, the SPSS Inc does launch some separate SPSS package such as SPSS Trends 16.0 that can run all types of regression models of time series.

We accessed spss 12.0 to run a fitting regression model of time series through a model of ARIMA (2, 0, 0). With SPSS 12.0 or a more complete SPSS 16.0, go to “Analyze,” find “Time Series,” then “ARIMA.” After clicking ARIMA box, fill out “ARIMA (2, 0, 0)” ― that is, ARIMA (p=2, d=0, q=0) ― and all dependent and independent variables, finally click “OK” for running the fitting regression model which is different from a standard regression model. The following are the results:

FINAL PARAMETERS:

Number of residuals 16

Standard error 24.317585

Log likelihood -70.76911

AIC 157.53822

SBC 163.71893

Analysis of Variance:

DF Adj. Sum of Squares Residual Variance

Residuals 8 5921.6077 591.34494

Variables in the Model:

B SEB T-RATIO APPROX. PROB.

AR1 1.34638 .23154 5.8149604 .00039832

AR2 -.87249 .25071 -3.4800732 .00831874

Violent_ .07586 .02443 3.1052947 .01454870

Narcotic -.06511 .03223 -2.0204460 .07800464

Prison_P -.06168 .02869 -2.1502269 .06375275

Executed 1.90751 1.80342 1.0577156 .32107503

Unemploy -3.30811 3.66493 -.9026377 .39308407

CONSTANT 356.20288 141.84468 2.5112177 .03630200

Covariance Matrix:

AR1 AR2

AR1 .05360920 -.03846960

AR2 -.03846960 .06285590

Correlation Matrix:

AR1 AR2

AR1 1.0000000 -.6627122

AR2 -.6627122 1.0000000

_

Regressor Covariance Matrix:

Violent_ Narcotic Prison_P Executed

Violent_ .0005968 -.0000071 .0002544 -.0019401

Narcotic -.0000071 .0010385 -.0002882 .0216249

Prison_P .0002544 -.0002882 .0008229 -.0336864

Executed -.0019401 .0216249 -.0336864 3.2523224

Unemploy .0353275 -.0493141 .0233172 -.6428579

CONSTANT -2.4403589 .7351334 -3.4277569 110.2406813

Unemploy CONSTANT

Violent_ .0353275 -2.4403589

Narcotic -.0493141 .7351334

Prison_P .0233172 -3.4277569

Executed -.6428579 110.2406813

Unemploy 13.4317340 -292.3047751

CONSTANT -292.3047751 20119.9133890

Regressor Correlation Matrix:

Violent_ Narcotic Prison_P Executed Unemploy

Violent_ 1.0000000 -.0089719 .3629896 -.0440348 .3945610

Narcotic -.0089719 1.0000000 -.3117054 .3720955 -.4175443

Prison_P .3629896 -.3117054 1.0000000 -.6511439 .2217834

Executed -.0440348 .3720955 -.6511439 1.0000000 -.0972640

Unemploy .3945610 -.4175443 .2217834 -.0972640 1.0000000

CONSTANT -.7042203 .1608238 -.8423950 .4309551 -.5622854

CONSTANT

Violent_ -.7042203

Narcotic .1608238

Prison_P -.8423950

Executed .4309551

Unemploy -.5622854

CONSTANT 1.0000000

The parameter estimates in this regression model under ARIMA (2, 0, 0) are different compared to those from a standard regression model. As the t ratios indicate, the impact (“B” or the “unstandardised coefficient”) of each independent variable (“predictor” or “regressor”) Narcotics, Prison Population, Violent Crimes on the dependent variable “murder” are all significant because the value of t is 2 or above while Unemployment Rate and numbers Executed are insignificant because the t ratio is less than 2 in both.

According to Lewis-Beck, the main reasons why a parameter estimate may be insignificant likely are: 1. inadequate sample size, 2. Type II error, 3. specification error, and 4. restricted variance in the independent variable (X). However, measures of significance simply tell us how representative of the general population the sample results are. In our case where we are dealing with official records that do not claim comprehensive coverage due to the dark figures of crime or the underground subsistence economy and variable official recording practices, we cannot assume that the results are representative of the general population from which the samples were drawn. Tests of significance are tests of randomness which official records do not approximate since what we have are accidental samples of those who become statistics in labour or penal records.

3. Missing Values

As we said, the missing values will surely affect the result, especially missing too many such as in the variable of “narcotics seizure.” When running multiple “linear regression” via SPSS 16.0, we followed a common practice ― “replace with mean” under “options” in the box of “linear regression” in SPSS. SPSS 16.0 does introduce “Missing Values Analysis” but does not include related features, the same reason as it does with SPSS Trends 16.0. Sorry for being unable to check and apply these useful features with our analysis but “missing values” are not the main problem being addressed in this paper. As a matter of fact, there will always be missing values in crime statistics given that such records are open to political influences as William Chambliss (2007) reminds us. However, official crime statistics remain useful as tools with which to hold public officials accountable for the enormous powers and resources that are allocated to them by the government for the protection of the people.

On that note, we urge the government of Trinidad and Tobago and those of the entire Caribbean to reconsider the intended policy of resuming capital punishment. There is overwhelming evidence that capital punishment encourages homicide and other violent crimes for some unknown reason. For instance, the European countries that abolished capital punishment are all less violent than the US which retains it and those states in the US without capital punishment also record lower rates of homicide on average compared to the states with capital punishment.

In Trinidad and Tobago, evidence available from the government funded project on the causes of crime, indicates that the escalation in violent crimes, including murder and kidnapping, coincided with the multiple executions of 1999. Prior to that brutal orgy of executions, murder was less than a hundred annually and there was no recorded kidnapping, for instance. Soon after the executions, the citizens probably took encouragement from the government of that time that it was all right to kill their fellow citizens and all manner of violent crimes sky-rocketed. We are appending the statistics at the end of this paper but Amnesty International (1984) documents similar evidence for Jamaica indicating that the escalation in homicide rates coincided with the resumption of executions in the early 1980s. Bartilow (2007) urges South American and Caribbean countries to reconsider drug enforcement because imprisonment appears to escalate recidivism and violent crime waves as Foucault (1977) also pointed out.

Discussion:

We appear to be very tough on Lewis in this paper but we should also be hard on Rusche and Kirchheimer for they share a lot of the economism of Lewis. Both approaches privilege the economic system as the driving force of development on the one hand and social control on the other. In this connection, Greenberg (1980) finds Rusche and Kirchheimer to be economistically reductionist while Garland observes that Punishment and Social Structure ‘overestimates the role of economic forces in shaping penal practice’ (Garland, 1990: 108). Similarly, David Johnson (1992) reports that although Arrighi (1970) critiqued the Lewis model as being of limited applicability to Southern Africa (as Lewis himself admitted) because extra economic forces determined the labour policies there up to 1920, evidence from the enforcement of the Native Labour Act of 1942 indicates that forced labour continued beyond the 1920s of Arrighi and that Africans continued to resist the forced mobilization of thousands of Africans to work for European farmers as part of the war effort.

The extent to which political ideas and related social values come into play in setting the agenda for development as well as the priorities of social control is relatively neglected in both approaches. The two approaches share the short-coming of assuming that the solution to the problem of labour and deviance would be found in economic policies that are applicable to industrialization and penal policies. Although Rusche and Kirchheimer talk broadly about the social structure, their analysis did not really go far from the economic substructure analogy just like Lewis. However, Figueroa (2005) has defended Lewis against the critique of economism by outlining his theory of democratic political leadership which could allow competent leaders to emerge even from the poorer classes.

The two approaches nevertheless share a flaw in assuming that labour would allow itself to be controlled and mobilized in any way that suits the needs of the ruling class; to move labour from subsistence sectors to the industrial sectors as Lewis believed; or that the crisis of penal policy could be resolved through progressive penal policy in the case of Rusche and Kirchheimer. The extent to which the labour problem could be solved by recognizing the need for independence among those engaged in the subsistence sector and the extent to which the penal crisis could be resolved by rolling back the nets of the control-freak state, whatever the prevailing economic system, were not seriously considered by both approaches.

In the case of surplus labour, what if the state adopts a revenue distrubition formula by which a significant portion of the national budget is allocated directly to the people to invest as they see fit rather than simply assuming that the unlimited supply of labour is always available to industrialists for exploitation? It may be more in tune with the needs of the informal sector to go beyond taxation and credits as mechanisms for extracting the surplus labour and instead offer farm subsidies kind of grants to the entrepreneurial minded labour to be their own bosses the way Europe and North America spends heavily on their rural white farmers but sadly not on the poor urban youth to enable them to become relatively autonomous from the industrial sector.

In the case of punishment and social structure, the fact that liberal punishment might not be the answer given that penal abolitionism could work more effectively especially in instances of so-called victimless crimes, was not taken up seriously for examination. But the data on the narcotics seized in Trinidad and Tobago in the above analysis indicate that if the nanny-state is allowed to relatively wither away to allow more autonomous space of independent self-employment by the rural and urban poor their creative energies could be productively channeled rather than subject them to labour/social control. This is indicative of how the solutions to the problems of labour and those of punishment can be pooled together in the direction of the increased democratization and decolonization of civil society. For instance, allowing young people to trade in the relatively harmless substances that lead them into the abyss of penalty would turn them into entrepreneurs in their own rights instead of looking at them as surplus labour to be expropriated from the land and exploited by industrialists or jailed for long terms in the war against drugs.

Conclusion:

If we perceive labour as unlimited we may tend to treat the surplus negatively. This negative treatment would not be against the bourgeoisie but against the poor, black, male. Therefore this understanding of labour could be applied to the theory of articulation as advanced by Hall (1980) where it is suggested that we cannot understand class relations (labour), for instance, without considering how such relations are articulated, disarticulated and re-articulated with race and gender relations. In other words when a surplus of labour is perceived by the state the poor, the non-white and depending on the situation a man/woman may become an endangered species as the state attempts to curb or control the surplus but the statistics we looked at above are not disaggregated in race-class-gender axes. We need to challenge our minds, nevertheless, to perceive population growth not as a bad thing but as an opportunity for wealth creation and not economic resource depletion, as Karl Marx observed in his critique of Malthus, a critique that Lewis ignored while lavishing attention on Malthus.

We are theorizing how to explain the negative correlation between the death-penalty and murder but as we argued above, the missing values make this very problematic. Additionally we would not invest much intellectual resources on trying to explain these relationships because as Agozino (2003) has argued, life is not linear, it is, in fact, messy and chaotic. Therefore looking for a linear causation or correlation between death-penalty, violent crime, unemployment, prison rates, etc. and murder is misleading as murder is (in the decolonization model of Agozino) a fractal phenomenon. There are many issues at play that explain the fluctuations of the death penalty in our society – low-levels of clearance in murder cases, long periods of trial and appeal, political enquiries and campaigns for abolition. The Express reported that the British who made the law requiring the death penalty during the colonial period are now reluctant to send police officers to help in the investigation of post-colonial murder cases because the British have since abolished the death penalty for all offences in their own country while the independent Caribbean countries cling to this barbaric, cruel and unusual penalty. Our suggestion is that the retention of the death penalty encourages an atmosphere that looks at human life as disposable and thereby contributes to the high levels of homicide in the Caribbean.

We live in control-freak societies where the ideology of imperialism dominates at all levels from the personal to the interpersonal, intergroup, national to international levels. So when we see many people working on land as subsistence farmers, we are encouraged to calculate how much more profits they could generate if we could round them up and confine them in factory cells to manufacture commodities for export and failing that, we should plan to expand the prison-industrial complex to ware-house them until they have been disciplined enough to be subjected to the logic of Fordism. At the personal and interpersonal level, we do the same to our own bodies, to spouses and our children, to our friends and colleagues, imagining how much more profitable they could be for us if they were engaged in gainful employment within or outside the family with us benefitting economically and any objection would result in repressive punitiveness that is often abusive and unloving or even destructive of human life, increasing the toll of homicide and stoking the fires of capital punishment and vice versa. Pepinskey (2006) recommends the alternative of peacemaking as a radical criminological approach and Agozino argues that peace is never enough without love and prosperity (Agozino, 2007).

We need to rediscover the wisdom of love in our personal, interpersonal national and international affairs instead of thinking that macro economics and authoritarian populism alone would solve all our problems. This element of love as a subject that is never taught in economics textbooks nor in criminology classes might hold the key to the solution of the related crises of population growth and prison population explosion. Regression analysis may never capture the logic of love because love is blind and fractal but we should not continue along a path that represents human beings simply as another industrial resource to be calculated and controlled along with land and capital.

We need to set up programmes in Love Studies as part of the solution to the increasing homicide rates and the problem of rising unemployment, industrialization problems and violent crimes. Dennis Pantin (2008) attempted to go beyond the call for industrial capitalism by Lewis by calling for ecologism as a potential contribution of the Caribbean to world civilization. Given the origin of the one love philosophy of Rasta in the Caribbean, the idea that love has a role to play in statecraft, criminology and the economy is not as far-fetched as it seems to mode of production types of analysis or to neoconservative popular fiction readers/writers who are driven by fanatical fear of the end of times to arrogate to themselves the roles of holy warriors who would embark on a massive destruction of human life as punishment by the forces of good against the forces of evil (Pfohl, 2007).

This paper would like to end by pointing out that even criminologists relatively ignore the biggest crimes against humanity while obsessing with how to control the so-called surplus populations of the poor. Wayne Morrison (2007) calls this tendency of silence on genocide ‘the companion that criminology ignored’ obviously following the critique of criminology by Stan Cohen for its ‘states of denial’ on human rights crimes (Cohen, 2001). It has been argued that the dual economy model of Lewis is convergent with human rights concerns (Henry-Lee, 2005) and the Crime and Social Structure theory of Rusche and Kirchheimer makes such concerns explicit. However, given the over-emphasis in both approaches on the economy as the most likely solution to the problem, we are reminded of the fact that huge multinational companies might dominate small island states to the extent that their criminal activities are neglected even when they cause more damage than some of the violent crimes that criminologists like to worry about (Pearce and Tombs, 2007).

Bibliography:

Agozino, B. (2003) Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason, London, Pluto Press.

Agozino, B. (2007) Criminology as Lovemaking, Working Paper Series, Department of Behavioural Sciences, UWI St. Augustine.

Amnesty International (1984) Jamaica: The Death Penalty, London, Amnesty.

Arrighi, G. (1970) 'Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianiz- ation of the African peasantry in Rhodesia', Journal of Development Studies, vi 198-233.

Bartilow, H.A. (2007) ‘Does Drug Enforcement Reduce Crime? An Empirical Analysis of the Drug War in Central America and Caribbean Countries’ in R. Deosaran, ed., Crime, Delinquency and Justice: A Caribbean Reader, Kingston, Ian Randle.

Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge, Polity.

Bush, G.H.W. (1973) ‘Foreword’ to Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, World Population Crisis: The United States Response (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973)

Campbell, H. (2005) ‘REFLECTIONS ON THE POST COLONIAL CARIBBEAN STATE IN THE 21ST CENTURY’ in Social and Economic Studies; Mar 2005; 54, 1.

Chambliss, W. (2007) ‘The Politics of Crime Statistics’ in C. Sumner, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Criminology, Oxford, Blackwell

Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial: Knowledge about Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge, Polity.

Cook, T. and Campbell, D. T. (1979) Quasi-Experimentation: Design & Analysis Issues for Field Settings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company).

Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, Middlesex, Penguin.

Figueroa, M. (2008) ‘Food Production for World Development and Other Lessons: Getting Past His Detractors to What We Can Still Learn from Lewis’, Fifth Lecture: 2008 Nobel Laureate Celebrations, UWI, St. Augustine

Figueroa, M. (2005) ‘W. Arthur Lewis’ Social Analysis and the Transformation of Tropical Economics’ in Social & Economic Studies, 54, 4, December.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York, Pantheon Books.

Garland, D. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory, Chicago, University of Chicago.

Girvan, N. (2008) ‘Sir Arthur Lewis – A Man of His Time, and Ahead of His Time’ Distinguished Lecture, Year of Sir Arthur Lewis, UWI, St. Augustine, 20 Feb.

Girvan, N. (2005) ‘Lewis for the 21st Century’ in Social & Economic Studies, 54, 3, September.

Girvan, N. (2005) ‘W.A. Lewis, The Plantation School and dependency: An Interpretation’ in Social & Economic Studies, 54, 3, September.

Greenberg, D.F. (1989) ‘Imprisonment and Unemployment: A Comment’ in Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 5, 187-191.

Hall, S. (1980) 'Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance.' In: Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO.

Johnson, A. (2008) ‘Hanging hang-up: British not sending police’ in The Daily Express, Thursday, 21 August.

Johnson, D. (1992) ‘Settler Farmers and Coerced African Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1936-46’ in The Journal of African History, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 111-128

Lewis, A.W. (1954) ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supply of Labour’ in Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 22, May pp 139-191.

Lewis, A.W. (1985) Racial Conflict and economic Development, Cambridge, Harvard.

Lewis, A.W. (1994) Collected Papers, 1941-1988, Vol. II, edited by P.A.M. Emmanuel, UWI, Institute of Social and Economic Research, St. Augustine.

Lewis-Beck, M. (1980) Applied Regression: An Introduction (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications)

Marx, K. (1906) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. The Process of Capitalist Production, tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, from the Third German Edition (of Das Kapital). Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co.

Marx, K. (1959) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow, Progress.

Mendenhall, W. and Sincich, T. (1996) A Second Course in Statistics: Regression Analysis 5th ed (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall).

Morrison, W. (2007) ‘Criminology, Genocide, and Modernity: Remarks on the Companion that Criminology Ignored’ in C. Sumner, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Criminology, Oxford, Blackwell.

Ostrom, C. (1990) Time Series Analysis: Regression Techniques (Newberry Park, CA: Sage Publications).

Ousmane, S. (1986) God's Bits of Wood. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.

Pantin, D. (2008) ‘Little Cays Can Open Mighty Doors: The Potential role of Small & Island Developing States (SIDS) in the transition from Capitalism to Ecologism’ in UWI Today, Sunday 25 May.

Pearce, F and Tombs, S. (2007) “Dance Your Anger and Your Joys’: Multinational Corporations, Power, ‘Crime” in C. Sumner, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Criminology, Oxford, Blackwell.

Pepinskey, H. (2006) Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press.

Pfohl, S. (2007) Left Behind: Religion, Technology and Flight from the Flesh, Victoria, CTheory Books/NWP.

Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, O. (1939, 1967) Punishment and Social Structure, New York, Russell & Russell.

Thanks to Jiabo Liu (Assistant Professor, Mississippi Valley University) and Keron King (Research Assistant, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine) for help with data.

Marx on Wages of Labour: “Eventually, however, this state of growth must sooner or later reach its peak. What is the worker’s position now?

3) “In a country which had acquired that full complement of riches both the wages of labour and the profits of stock would probably be very low the competition for employment would necessarily be so great as to reduce the wages of labour to what was barely sufficient to keep up the number of labourers, and, the country being already fully peopled, that number could never be augmented.” [Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 84.]

“The surplus would have to die.

“Thus in a declining state of society — increasing misery of the worker; in an advancing state — misery with complications; and in a fully developed state of society — static misery” (Marx, 1959).

Thorne, Christopher, Allies of a Kind. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978: 158-59). Before WWII, Charles W. Taussig had been FDR's "personal representative" in the West Indies and "chairman of a presidential commission to study the natives in the Caribbean Islands." Fulton Oursler, Jr., "Secret Treason," American Heritage (December, 1991: 55). Fortunately for the Puerto Ricans, FDR 's information about Nazi sterilization was flawed. For an accurate description of Nazi attempts at mass sterilization, see: Alexander, Leo. "Medical Science Under Dictatorship," The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol . 241, No. 2 (July 14, 1949: 41). For the medical report from the experiment see: Alexander Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy (Henry Schuman: New York, 1949: 136-137). The report notes: "If persons are to be rendered permanently sterile, this can be accomplished only by X-ray dosages so high that castration with all its consequences results." It concludes by noting: "It appears to be impossible to carry out such a program without the persons affected sooner or later ascertaining that they have been sterilized or castrated by means of X-rays."

Charles. Ostrom, Time Series Analysis: Regression Techniques (Newberry Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990), p. 9. See also, William Mendenhall and Terry Sincich, A Second Course in Statistics: Regression Analysis 5th ed (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 522.

Thomas Cook and D. T. Campbell, Quasi-Experimentation: Design & Analysis Issues for Field Settings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979), p. 239.

To check the “significance” of “B,” the unstandardised coefficient as the parameter estimate, we simply follow “the rule of thumb” the parameter estimate would be insignificant if the t ratio were smaller the “2.” See, Michael Lewis-Beck, Applied Regression: An Introduction (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), p. 35.

Michael Lewis-Beck, Applied Regression: An Introduction (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), p. 35.

Those interested in the analysis of missing values can follow these leads:

Missing Values Analysis (SPSS 16.0)

Missing value analysis helps address several concerns caused by incomplete data. Cases with missing values that are systematically different from cases without missing values can obscure your results. Also, missing data may reduce the precision of calculated statistics because you have less information than originally planned. Another concern is that the assumptions behind many statistical procedures are based on complete cases, and missing values can complicate the theory required. SPSS Missing Values Analysis enables you to:

• Describe the pattern of missing data

• Estimate means, standard deviation, covariances and correlations using a listwise, pairwise, regression or EM (expectation-maximization) method

• Impute (fill in) missing values with estimated values using regression or EM methods

The Government of Trinidad and Tobago funded project, ‘Causes of Crimes in the Country, the Region and Globally’, through the University of the West Indies, St, Augustine.

Although Foucault asserted in his concluding chapter, The Carceral, that: ‘Were I to fix a date of completion of the carceral system, I would choose…. 22 January 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray’, a penal colony for children in France; he was completely silent on colonialism and penal colonies in the Caribbean that would have made his quotation of a dying child’s regret – “What a pity I left the colony so soon” – sound like a child’s play (Foucault, 1977: 293).

Marx's footnote on Malthus from Capital: ‘If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose " Essay on Population " appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the " principle of population," slowly worked-out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development…. All honour to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening of the hours of labour, a fact to which he elsewhere in his pamphlet draws attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious facts, make invariability in the length of the working-day the groundwork of all their investigations. But the conservative interests, which Malthus served, prevented him from seeing that an unlimited prolongation of the working-day, combined with an extraordinary development of machinery, and the exploitation of women and children, must inevitably have made a great portion of the working-class “supernumerary,” particularly whenever the war should have ceased, and the monopoly of England in the markets of the world should have come to an end. It was, of course, far more convenient, and much more in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored like a true priest, to explain this “over-population” by the eternal laws of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production. (Marx, 1906: Ch. 17.4.a, n7).

Andy Johnson, ‘Hanging hang-up: British not sending police’ in The Daily Express, Thursday, 21 August 2008.