Dear Editor,
I am convinced more and more every day that my desire to see an inaugural ex-offender rehabilitation centre established in Guyana is rooted in logic and basic common sense. My vision was again highlighted when I read what Child Protection Agency Director Ann Green said recently. She spoke of the need for her agency to conduct parenting classes. Mrs Green stated emphatically that “Parenting is in trouble!”
This begs a series of obvious, logical questions. If parenting is in trouble, what kind of children are these troubled parents raising? If a parent doesn’t know how to parent, what kinds of mores and values are they instilling in their children?
Now that you have answered those two questions, you are closer to understanding why I am in this mad scramble for the establishment of a post-release, ex-offender, rehabilitation centre. We are failing our children, they are falling through the cracks, they are behaving badly, we are incarcerating them, and then they are returning to the society with additional scars and bruises, branded as ‘criminals.’
Many in the society, even religious leaders, show disdain and scant regard for these ‘criminals’, when the problem, by and large, has its genesis in problematic and failed parenting. Mrs Green is right and should be applauded for her frank assessment of the main contributor to Guyana’s crime problem. In essence what the CPA Director is saying is that if the child does not receive the requisite foundational skill-sets to prepare him/her for life, then that child is off to a problematic start in life. While in the USA I worked for the South Bend Community School Corporation in Indiana. My title was Family and Community Specialist. My role was primarily to mediate in the interest of the children, between the school and the parents. I worked for an inner-city school.
What I was made to understand was that projections for the building or expansion of prisons were based on the dropout rates of what they call the K-12, Title One schools, in the inner cities. These were the primary schools in neighbourhoods with predominantly underprivileged, addicted, low-income families. Yes, with ‘parenting problems’. People are people. The parents whom Mrs Green is planning to target fit the category of the parents I interacted with and whose children I mediated for. If the professionals in the USA could tie the realities of problematic parenting to crime, it is obvious that that sociological fact could be assumed here in Guyana. That is why for all we are bent on increasing the size of the police force and incarcerating these youths, there must be a comparative, well thought out, well-funded rehabilitative programme, for after all, it is not solely the youths’ problem. Additionally, that is why what the President is doing by releasing non-violent, young offenders has merit, in my view.
Yours faithfully,
Pastor Wendell P Jeffrey
Practical Christianity Ministries