The report by the Joint Select Committee (JSC) on National Security presented in Parliament on December 13 highlighted an alarmingly high level of public distrust in the police as a key issue facing the criminal justice system.
The JSC report pointed to a high incidence of police malpractice, unlawful conduct, corruption and extra-judicial killings that have left just 42 per cent of the population trusting police officers, while only 59 per cent are willing to report a crime when they are a victim.
Criminal activity is under-reported, with 39 per cent of victims of serious crimes reporting incidents.
Police apathy and diminished confidence in investigations were additional reasons for the loss of confidence in the police service.
The report gathered information from 2022, when 12,802 crimes were reported, with prosecutions starting on just 4,066 of them with successful convictions in just 473 of the cases brought before the courts.
Changing that will be a big task for the Commissioner of Police who may wish to start with the lowest hanging fruit, police apathy, which is more a customer-service issue than a policing matter.
Policing, conviction and incarceration in Trinidad and Tobago needs rethinking, with a greater effort made to reorient its intent from punishment to rehabilitation.
The high percentage of convicts returning to crime and to prison is cause for serious concern. The report found that 49 per cent of inmates had been jailed three times before, with just 19 per cent entering the prison system as first-time offenders.
A prison sentence is increasingly not just punishment for a crime, but an introduction to a spiral of bad influence that efficiently seduces the imprisoned into a life of crime.
Even inmates on remand, citizens who are not convicted of a crime but either cannot make bail or are denied bail, are exposed to the same influences and environment as hardened criminals, often for years as their cases crawl through the legal system.
It will take more than recently passed legislation addressing plea bargaining, ankle-bracelet monitoring, amendments to the Bail Act and most recently the end of preliminary inquiries to deliver meaningful change in the overcrowding of men's prisons.
Any response to the legitimate and widely known issues raised by the JSC report must begin by dealing with the practical issues it enumerates.
The prison system cannot cope with the inmates it currently manages.
The rate of convictions relative to reported crimes is appalling, but if it improves, space is running out to house the convicted.
A prison system that breeds criminals is of no use to society.
Preventative care, healing strategies and restorative justice principles must play a greater role in our criminal justice system, which is choking on colonial-era punitive measures that are amplifying instead of reducing the potential for crime through a continuing institutional injustice.
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