No to detention centres
Published:Sunday | January 26, 2014 | 12:00 AM
EDUCATION MINISTER Ronald Thwaites has indicated that a rehabilitative residential school constructed in Malvern, St Elizabeth, to help rehabilitate disruptive students, was unlikely to reap the desired results.
Thwaites made the assertion while responding to comments from Opposition Leader Andrew Holness on school violence and its impact on crime nationally.
"The identification of students, at the earliest stages, that have behavioural challenges is critical," Holness had charged.
He recalled that when he was education minister during the previous Jamaica Labour Party administration, the Government was told by teachers that they were incapable of handling at least five per cent of the high school population because of their dysfunctional behaviour.
"We built in Malvern, St Elizabeth, a school that would start that process and we intended to have them right across the island for boys and girls. It was a facility for referral," Holness said.
Located across the road from the prestigious Munro College in the community of Potsdam, high in the hills of Malvern, the facility to be known as the Malvern Special High School was to house 40-60 boys of high-school age for a maximum of six months.
While Thwaites said his ministry was pushing for the establishment of regional referral centres to treat with major dysfunctional tendencies in children, he declared he was not in support of 'detention centres' like the one planned in Malvern.
BREAKDOWN IN HOMES
The minister told Parliament that the behaviour of many children resulted from a breakdown in homes and communities. He said the therapeutic intervention being planned by the ministry was intended to follow children to their homes.
"If you don't do that then you are wasting your time," Thwaites said.
"The basis of the problem often is at home and has to be dealt with in the community that the child is going to live in. That is the problem with this detention centre, or therapeutic centre, otherwise called, that was planned. First of all, it could not nearly deal with the scope of the problem and secondly it took the person out of the very community that he or she has to live in. Every piece of expert advice that we got was that this is absolutely the wrong way to go," Thwaites added.
Thwaites was speaking after presenting to Parliament a Jamaica Constabulary Force study on the link between schools and the prison population.
He outlined a range of intervention strategies which he said would be targeted at 54 schools in particular.
The study listed 18 schools that featured most in the sample of 894 violent criminals who were interviewed, and concluded that the typical inmate is under 34 years, is from either the Corporate Area or St Catherine, and comes from a single-parent upbringing.
"The overall problem that we are trying to deal with is far beyond the reach of any individual or school. You are talking about the condition of a society. You are talking about the dominant norms, many of which are antithetical to wholesome personal development and top education," the minister said.