The Impact of Parenting Intervention on Crime Reduction in Jamaica: A study on the Citizen Security and Justice Programme in the August Town Community

Abstract

Crime has become a public health issue affecting most developed and developing countries

causing governments to tackle this issue by spending an exorbitant amount of their budget on security, health and social programmes. Crime rate tends to be higher globally among developing countries thus forcing all stakeholders to develop programmes and strategies aimed at preventing the negative effects of crime.

Like any developing country, Jamaica struggle with high crime rate and the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP) is a social intervention programme aimed at reducing crime utilizing parenting education as one of their crime prevention strategy to strengthen the capacity of the family, while empowering parents to handle conflict among them and helping their children protect themselves without being violent.

As such, this study sought to find out the impact and the relationship of the CSJP Parenting Intervention and crime reduction in the August Town community, from it started in 2001. Both primary and secondary methods were used to generate data for this study. A survey was administered to the parents in the community to analyze the impact of the intervention. Secondary data was then collected, to do a trend analysis from the Jamaica Constabulary Force data on the amount of crime (murder, robbery and shooting) for the period 1995-2014 and for intervention and non-intervention police divisions. The social disorganization theory was used to guide this discussion as it relates to explaining the mediating link between reductions of crime in August Town, given that social cohesion along with parenting skills are pertinent to mobile against crime.

The findings of this research substantiate that this government intervention is well targeted in the police divisions more prone to crime and violence in Jamaica. However, noticing the trend that crime in Jamaica is still increasing and the limits to the intervention not being implemented in all communities of the volatile and vulnerable police divisions lessens the possible impact of reduction in the crime numbers. The research hypothesis supported the general findings of this research that the increase attendance of the parents to the CSJP parenting intervention workshops helps make better parents and there was a positive correlation between the satisfaction with the parenting intervention and the higher expectation of crime studied in this research such as murder, shooting and robbery.

Therefore, indications from these findings suggests that CSJP parenting intervention satisfies a direct need to reshape the culture of Jamaican parents and to address challenges imposed on them based on structural problems of society. This concludes that government along with the local community and private stakeholders should embrace an inclusive agenda for emphasis focused on giving credence to social intervention programmes, which address the training of parents to assist in reducing crime. In addition there is a need for additional research to improve the generalizability of this study so that it can be used more effectively for making decisions and policy making to have a greater impact for the reduction of crime in Jamaica.