BASSETERRE: Attorney General and Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs Garth Wilkin used a recent regional CARICOM UNDP conference to highlight the importance of alternatives to detention in addressing crime and delivering justice.
Wilkin was a featured speaker at the conference in May where he presented on non-custodial sentencing, pre-trial detention, and informal justice mechanisms using St. kits at Nevis as an example.
The Attorney General said the Federation’s approach to crime reduction has been built on collaboration among government agencies, law enforcement, communities, and other key stakeholders.
“All of the stakeholders, the heads of the various stakeholders, social development, customs, police, the army, myself as the Attorney General, the Prime Minister, advisers, national security advisor, elevate, all of the different elements in our society that are trying to solve this decades old problem. We meet every Friday and all the different stakeholders come into our room and we talk and we get updates and we figure out solutions and that’s the only way we can do it. You cannot do it from the ministry of justice. You cannot do it from the police. You cannot do it from customs. You cannot do it from national security advisor alone. You cannot do it from education alone. You have to have everybody all the stakeholders involved,” Wilkin said
He said research continues to show that detention alone cannot solve crime and that countries must explore other effective interventions.
“Now the study asks us to confront an important regional reality. Can our justice systems continue relying primarily on detention based responses while expecting sustainable justice outcomes, stronger public trust, and long-term reductions in violence and offending? And the answer is no,” Wilkin siad. “The findings suggest that the correct trajectory is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.”
The Attorney General added that Caribbean countries must continue to develop practical alternatives that improve access to timely justice while reducing pressures on the criminal justice system.
“The difficulty is not always legal reform. The difficulty is implementation. Probation systems remain overstretched. Monitoring tools remain limited and public confidence in alternatives remains uneven. As a result, imprisonment often continues to function as the most administratively convenient response, even where more appropriate alternatives exist. If you don’t have an alternative program that is actually functioning, how is the court going to order that alternative sentence if they know it’s not functioning? They’re simply going to put you in jail because the jail functions. So it’s very important for us to not just talk about these alternative measures but have systems in place, have people trained, channel the resources into that so that these alternative mechanisms for punishment can actually work.”