Why Criminals Don't Care.

Arch Deacon Hodge of the St.Georges Anglican Church of Bassetrre St.Kitts stated on Friday, April 22, while a guest on Youth Voices, a popular daily radio talk show in St. Kitts, that while he presided over the funeral of a young man who had been shot, he was not aware that a stabbing incident had taken place in the Anglican Church Yard.He stated during the show, that he became sensitive to something taking place when he observed persons looking through the church windows and saw people leaving the church building.

What Kittitians find disturbing is that the young men came onto the church premises to commit this violent offence in the presence of persons gathered for the funeral, as though it was an abandoned street in the dark of night with no one around to witness their ghastly deed.

People are shocked that young people no longer consider anything as being sacred, and are prepared to perform their vengeful, criminal deeds anytime and anyplace.

One of the things that these young men are often heard saying when they are warned of the consequence of their deeds is that they do not care. They do not care that the young men they murder are leaving fatherless infants; they do not care that these men have families who will be left to mourn the loss of their loved-ones; they do not care that the little island is suffering the effects of a damaged reputation because of their actions.

Not only do these young men state openly that they do not care, their lack of care is demonstrated in their actions. They throw bottles and stones at each other in the heart of the city, causing people who are going about their duty to scramble for safety. They attack each other with guns and other weapons right in the heart of the town and in the presence of onlookers. They do not care, as they, no doubt, declare to Law Enforcement Officers and others who plead with them to behave.

Neuroscientists Jorge Moll and Ricardo de Olivera-Souza state that the human brain consists of regions that are responsible for moral cognition; areas of the brain that guide human understanding of what is right and what is wrong. These regions of the brain are the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobe.These two areas of the brain are responsible for determining moral human actions of which there are four categories, two of which I will mention here:

1. Self-serving actions that do not affect others.

2. Self-serving actions that negatively affect others.

( you may find more information about this in Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape, subtitled: How Science Can Determine Human Values).

The only conclusion I am able to reasonably arrive at, is that there must be somethhing in these young men's frontal cortexes or temporal lobes that is simply not functional, because they seem not to care whether their actions either serve themselves or negatively affect others. It is as though they live in a world of their own, and if this is the case the others of us are in grave danger.

There are many who feel that the reason young men have no care about their wicked deeds is because they have nothing to fear. They fear neither imprisonment nor capital punishment. There are many sociological reasons these days that are offered to explain why these young men (and some women among them now too) have come to a position where they simply do not have any feeling of care for anything or anyone including themselves.

It is my opinion that the entire Western World has gone soft on criminals. Human beings need something to fear. It is in human nature to behave if there is an awareness of severe consequence for deliberate, bad deeds,particularly if it is known that the more evil the deed, the more severe will be the penalty. Quite the opposite is taking place in the Western World including the Caribbean these days. The more severe the crime, the more tender and gentle the dealing with the criminal it seems.

There are ever expanding explanations of childhood difficulties and family problems to contextualize these behaviors. These things may well be so, but by now it aught to be clear that these types of assessments and analyses often play right into the hands of wicked people wilfully bent on doing wrong simply because they are fully cognizant that nothing will happen to cause them severe physical suffering for their wicked deeds.

Human beings will forever abhor pain,and very likely to behave themselves if they know that their bad deeds will undoubtably bring horrific agony down upon their heads when they are discovered. When there is no pain to fear, criminals will cause entire communities to cower in fright. What we have done in the Caribbean is permit watchdog institutions such as Amnesty International and others like them, seated comfortably on their perches on high rise glass buildings in developed nations (with the resources to psychologically and medicinally control their criminally oriented citizens and out of control infants) to spoil our safety and our peace of mind by threatening us with black-listings and economic sanctions if we punish unruly children and boldfaced criminals in ways that work.