The Tribune

THE rising tide of serious crime in The Bahamas has reached the point at which a national debate is required to help solve the blight on society.

The reasons behind the increasing catalogue of murders, shootings, armed robberies and sexual assaults are many and varied, from gangs and drugs to youth unemployment and poverty. Is incarceration the answer? What can be done?

In 2015, an evidence-based discussion is required, one with emotion removed.

Dr Mike Neville is a forensic psychiatrist who has spent 40 years – the majority in The Bahamas – working in the hospitals, courts and prisons at close quarters with offenders. His experience and expertise qualifies him to examine the causes, effects and potential remedies of crime, from the cradle to the grave, and drawing on how other countries have tackled the issue.

And we want you, the readers, to be involved and help inform the debate. Starting today, and week-by-week during the coming months, Dr Neville will be analysing the reasons behind crime and challenging the perceptions of how it can be dealt with.

On Tuesdays, through his articles in The Tribune and in a live phone-in programme starting next week on Cool 96FM, he will welcome views – unconventional, challenging and supportive – from everyone. Join the discussions via comments on tribune242.com or email to lifeofcrime@tribunemedia.net.

The cure for crime lies with society as well as the government, police and other agencies. It is time for new year resolve and resolution.

WARS have been ever present as far back as history takes us. I can remember struggling to recall dates of famous battles and numerous conflicts to pass history exams. I cannot, however, remember how long the “War on Crime” has been fought in The Bahamas.

While I am attempting to recollect … is there still a “War on Drugs” and, if not, what was the outcome? It is probably my ignorance but not only am I not sure how long these wars have lasted but who exactly is, or was, the enemy in the first place.

Crime is part of the fabric of our society. Today it seems that the debate on how to deal with it needs greater clarity and more evidence-based information to form it. I once stated at a crime presentation that the country should “Prosecute the Peace”. It was certainly a catchy phrase, but the odd thing was that not one person asked me to explain what it meant!

What is required is an interactive discussion on crime that steers away from the raw emotions of vengeful anger to a fact-based debate incorporating evidence-based research to try to tackle this societal issue.

Through the columns of The Tribune, its website and Radio House airwaves over the coming months, I will be exploring the multifarious aspects of crime, looking at the causes, effects and potential remedies, drawing on global evidence and my background in forensic psychiatry. And I will do it by encouraging your help and feedback so that we may present an informed body of work that can be used to help the authorities tackle the biggest threat to Bahamian society today and reduce crime levels.

Let me first introduce myself to show where and how my concepts of crime have evolved.

I did my medical training at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland, and after I qualified I came to The Bahamas to do my internship at Princess Margaret Hospital. It was July 1973 and on the 10th, at a few minutes after midnight, I assisted Dr Siqui with a caesarian section and delivered the first independent Bahamian baby. I suspect most of the Bahamian doctors were at Fort Charlotte celebrating.

In 1974, I worked in the emergency room and began a long and varied relationship with the Royal Bahamas Police Force. There was not much crime back then but part of our responsibility was to give an opinion on sobriety, fitness for punishment and even stranger, the pronouncement of death. Apparently you are not dead until a doctor certifies it! This, then, meant a trip to court in cases of homicide to give evidence, the beginning of a long career for me in front of the courts.

I met and married my wife during this period and we left for England in 1974 to further our studies. I specialised in psychiatry and as part of my training I worked in forensic psychiatry attached to one of the first medium secure units recommended by the Butler report (1975). This also gave me my first taste of prison, evaluating inmates at Strangeways in Manchester and travelling to Rampton, a special hospital for the criminally insane. The conditions at the prison were pretty bad, leading to a riot and prison takeover in 1990.

We returned to The Bahamas in 1979 and I entered Sandilands Hospital, only securing my release in July 2013. When I arrived in The Bahamas, the Ministry of Health did not seem to know what to do with me so I was sent to Fox Hill Prison.

The first day in an institution is always important to remember. Your feelings are bombarded and that initial reaction needs to be kept clear in your mind to avoid becoming immune to all sorts of horrors that, over time, can begin to seem normal. I was given a grand tour of the prison - slop buckets and all - but when the senior officer took me into an empty corner room, which he offered to me as an office, my alarm bells went off and I graciously declined, explaining that protocol would only allow me to be assigned by the prison medical officer. Just as well: it was the holding cell next to the gallows: imagine trying to do psychotherapy there!

I began with a full research project into the incidence of mental illness in the prison and persuaded the authorities to allow Alcoholics Anonymous into the prison for a year. I was gradually accepted and found many of the officers also needed some help: after all they were also stuck in the same dire surroundings.

I helped form the prison medical committee, which was an early effort at prison reform, but as our ideas grew we were rapidly disbanded. I also did research with Dr Tim McCartney and Dr Harry Ferere on the incidence of substance abuse prior to incarceration.

The major fascination for me has always been “why did folk do what they did? Why rape? Why murder?”

During that time, I was able to talk freely with a huge number of young men stuck behind bars. This led to countless appearances in the Magistrate’s court and more frequently in the Supreme Court, where I felt it was an honour to give expert testimony in front of some immensely intellectual judges. The public were not so kind in their assessment of me, leaning to the view that in some way I was there to get people off. In fact the jury makes up its own mind: my role was to explain how things may have happened and whether the accused may or may not have been in their right mind or perhaps very disturbed at the time they committed the offence.

I was certainly aware that my testimony was not always accepted or understood. In one trial of a man accused of rape and murder I was first asked if I had performed tests for semen. I explained that I was a forensic psychiatrist and that those tests would have been performed by a forensic pathologist; I was then shown some pretty horrendous photographs of the deceased lady and asked what sort of person would do such a thing.

I replied that it would probably be someone with strong sadistic traits in their personality; I also said that I had not tested the accused for these traits. It was reported the next day that Dr Neville had done no psychological tests for semen and also had performed no sadistic tests!

I helped to design a psychiatric wing for the prison, which was never built, and served on the government’s Prison Reform Committee in 2002. Some changes have certainly occurred but many recommendations are still lost in the report. I was the only survivor from that commission to appear on the next government’s crime council; I must confess that there had been so many other reports that I did not feel that another was needed.

I felt that we should create a structure to track crime, look at arrests, charges, when and how is bail given and how long does it take to reach a conviction. The group would also be able to look at other countries to see what works and what has not worked and to encourage trial projects here. That was not the way the council wanted to proceed and at the end I felt unable to sign the final document.

It really seems that the experts are as much at war with each other, as they are against crime.

We have had Pomposities of Pontificating Professors and Prelates and Convocations of Calamitous Commissions. It is time for a more reasoned approach.

I propose we begin this series by looking at what is a crime and who are the criminals. Are we all fighting ourselves or, like Don Quixote, are we “tilting at windmills”? We must know who and what the enemy is before continuing full tilt into the abyss.

NEXT WEEK

Dr Mike defines crime: the concepts, religious and secular, the hypocrisy and the history of various laws.