Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves has said that in seeking to find explanations for the causes of crimes, attention must be paid not merely to the behavior of society, but rather the behavior of individuals making up the society.
Addressing the opening of a national conversation on crime and violence at the Methodist Church Hall in Kingstown yesterday, Prime Minister Gonsalves said that what is critical is the query, “why are some individuals more likely than others to commit crimes?”
A credible search to an answer to that question, he said, requires multidisciplinary approaches ranging over the fields of the social sciences including psychology, the medical sciences and theology, among other disciplines.
Prime Minister Gonsalves acknowledged that while some people accept that poverty, parental neglect, low self-esteem, alcohol and drug abuse are all connected in explaining why people commit crimes, this is not always the case.
