Crime doesn’t pay, says minister

Whoever says crime pays is wrong!

This is the message that Minister of State in the Office of the Attorney General with responsibility for Crime Prevention, Corey Lane is stressing this evening.

He emphasised this point as he retorted on national radio the suggestion that crime was lucrative for criminals and professionals such as doctors and lawyers, whose job it is to treat the wounded and to represent them in court cases respectively.

Essentially, the Minister’s message was that if crime paid, most of the people involved in it would prosper. The fact is, the opposite occurs.

“I come up as a little boy in this country and you see the people who were peddling their little crime…I’m not a little boy anymore, but when I go, I see the same people there. If it was paying they would not be there.

“I see a number of them in the graveyard, a number of them in prison, a number of them, their mother had to mortgage their house to pay the lawyers. And some criminal lawyers would tell you it don’t pay because they owe them and that’s why they have to [foreclose] on the houses,” said the Minister.

Lane called the Getting Down to Brass Tacks programme to clarify his comments last night at a joint Barbados Labour Party meeting of the St. James constituencies about the seriousness of gun-related murder in Barbados, after he presented statistics that show that Barbados had the lowest rate of such crime in the Caribbean and Latin America. He suggested that media reports played a role in the perception of crime. 

“The new narrative, the correct narrative, the truth has to be out there to them to understand that crime ain’t paying, ain’t paying anybody. It’s destroying the country, it’s destroying lives, it’s destroying communities, it’s destroying households and families. And that is what I come to let the people know,” he maintained. 

Regarding schemes the Government is formulating to help people turn away from crime, Minister Lane said a group from the United Kingdom currently in Barbados was pinpointing success stories that could also work in the island. 

“We are looking at what they’ve done, what specific areas had a plummeting in crime, what have they done successfully. And they have offered some of the people who were into crime before something called a ‘steady income’. 

“People think that crime [gives] big income, but that’s really for the people at the top. A lot of the people at the bottom, they put something in their hand [and] they go ‘long about their business,” Lane pointed out. (SNR)

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