Wilberne Persaud - Financial Gleaner Columnist

Bees are fantastic, extraordinarily incredible creatures. Why? At the height of their powers and abundance of wealth, they abandon their riches to another generation to renew their struggle once again.

Yes. Bees swarm from their hives once the storehouse of honey is overfull and they have prepared for the next generation by leaving several occupied queen cells. One becomes the matriarch of the old colony. This is nature at work.

Guarantees survival

Their behaviour more or less guarantees future reproduction and survival. Scouts search for a new home, which, once agreed upon, becomes the target of frenzied building, nectar collecting and honey-producing activity. Insects and animals seek areas of abundant foraging.

Simply giving up in the face of stress and adversity is rare.

Legendary migration

The norm is to roam, migrate seasonally or otherwise to keep up with nature's changes that alter the abundance, ebb and flow of life-sustaining food sources. Human beings seem to be no different.

Jamaican migration and the success of our migrants in varied spheres of endeavour in so many countries is indeed legendary.

The greater proportion of non-white-collar 'economic crime' or criminal activity grasped in its most general form is a kind of foraging - finding the place where sustenance exists in abundance.

We can agree on this, whether it is individual purse snatching, goat and cattle thieving, murder to enforce extortion, gangland killings to enforce respect of turf or garrison building and forced relocation of people to allow specific political representation.

This, of course, rules out the crime of passion: lovers' and family quarrels that end in tragic homicide.

Even in some of the cases involving families, we might have to consider them as 'economic crimes' as brothers, and even sometimes sisters fight over land left by dead parents and the like.

If these types of crimes are omitted from our calculation, we might then consider the magnitude.

Criminal enterprise

A criminal enterprise does not begin as an out-of-control teenager 'jus chuckin badness and killin people'. Nor does it begin with the adult demanding respect from the one who 'mash 'im toe in dancehall and nah say sorry quick enough' hence was shot.

So if normal human beings are similar to the insects and animals - going where foraging is good - what can this tell us about the alarming upsurge in criminal violence and murder?

Unlike bees, we humans rarely give up our wealth at the height of our powers and accumulation. Instead we tend to reinforce accumulation until it becomes an end in itself. From the perspective of criminal activity, it is interesting that some bees engage in 'hive robbing'. They infiltrate a foreign colony and steal honey.

Form of human foraging

This, as far as I know, is rare and guard bees at the hive entrance try to prevent it. 'Economic crime', as I speak of it here, includes murder and is merely another form of human foraging. It is one, however, that society outlaws.

But society, often in so doing, makes returns from criminal activity more lucrative. The most obvious examples are, of course, prohibition in the 1920s United States with the rum-running and organised crime it nourished and currently the treatment of stuff like ganja and others.

The Dutch have a different view to most on this issue. But that is for another discussion.

So what can we say of our efforts to curb crime? Obviously nothing tried so far has worked. All efforts at equal, opposite and greater force have only, it appears, made matters worse. Some suggest legal concealed guns for anyone without a criminal record - individual defence by attack. In similar vein, those who advocate more abundant firepower for the police make the identical mistake.

Escalation in access to and availability of the tools of violence, such as the ubiquitous M-16, do not curb it. That much is obvious. Today's clamour for execution of the death penalty is merely another form of what appears to be folly. For as my wise old farmer friend has said: 'Criminals dem like nut grass, yuh pull up one and 10 more deh underground a wait fi spring up'.

So what can be done? Jamaica has had several reports by crime task forces of recent vintage.

Implement solutions

These should be re-evaluated and to the extent that they provide for solutions, implemented in earnest.

I have not read any of them but certainly the experts would have disaggregated economic crimes from others, would have looked at murder as a result of disrespect and so on and finally, would have suggested short- and long-term actions rooted in the society's particular culture and history.

Of this I am sure. There is one thing, however, which in returning to our metaphor must be a part of the solution. The area of foraging has to be minimised. Capture and punishment as deterrent has to become a real fear for the criminal. For this to happen, links between and among the criminal enterprise and officialdom have to be shattered.

Strong official will

To do this it shall require strong official will, effort and time. Prescriptive measures in a recent Gleaner report on the problem included "two-party agreement on degarrisonising, end contracts to garrison dons, end dons making contributions to political parties, disarm garrisons", among a much longer long list.

These speak to a major part of the problem. Surely the prescription recognises the presence of an area of abundant foraging but can we create drought?