As crime continues to be a hot button topic for residents nationally, Vice President of the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association Joseph Darville is offering some suggestions, which he says may help to address the problem.
During a wide-ranging interview with The Freeport News yesterday, Darville said he believes it should pain every single Bahamian to know that to date, a total of 104 murders have already been committed in the country.
“That’s not even including those who are near death in hospitals because of attempted murder.
“You have a place like Broward County, which has over a million inhabitants – their count so far for this year is 65 murders.
“We have 350,000 people and ours is over 100.”
“There is something fundamentally wrong,” he said.
Noting that the government is seeking to bring a range of legislation to Parliament which would speak to various facets of the crime problems, Darville said he believes that only deals with the matter at hand, and does not address the root causes that lead people to commit crimes.
“Laws are not going to stop people from committing crimes, because they are not even conscious of the fact that they would be punished while they are in the process of committing a crime,” he said.
However, he says there are some measures that could be taken to ensure that such persons are not given the chance to re-offend.
Another measure that Darville said he believes may be more helpful than punitive to the offender, is the chemical castration of persons convicted of sexual crimes against children.
“If an individual has committed a sexual crime against a child, and for whatever reason the person is out, and commits it again, I would recommend that chemical castration be the punishment for that person, because there’s no way that you can allow an individual who is going to prey upon children, to have any chance to do it again. Of course that will go as well for the rape of a woman and maybe in the process of the rape, a murder,”?he said.
