When the Law Changes, Who Gets Left Behind?

There is something we should remember whenever we talk about crime, punishment, rehabilitation, reparations and justice in the Caribbean: the law has never existed outside of history. Laws are created by societies at particular moments, under particular political, economic and social conditions, and what one generation regards as necessary for maintaining order can later be understood very differently. That does not mean that every law is unjust or that every person who violates a law is a victim, but it should make us cautious about treating the law itself as an eternal measure of morality.

The history of Belize provides some uncomfortable examples. During the colonial period, slavery was a lawful institution, and the settlement developed legal and political structures that reflected a society in which race, property and power were deeply intertwined. In August 1787, tensions between established white settlers and free Black and coloured residents became serious enough that Superintendent Edward Marcus Despard attempted to intervene in a dispute involving the treatment of people of colour, only to find himself constrained by the settlement’s magistrates and political structure. The historical record illustrates that the people living under colonial law did not experience that law equally, even when they were technically living within the same jurisdiction. (Dokumen)

There are also records of colonial punishment that are difficult to read through a modern lens without confronting the distance between legality and justice. The broader British colonial system included public executions and the post-mortem display of bodies, practices that were understood in their time as instruments of deterrence and social order. What matters for our purposes is not simply that such practices existed, but that institutions could take an act of violence by the state, place it inside a legal framework and present it to society as necessary. History therefore gives us a useful warning: legality can tell us what a society has authorized at a particular moment, but it does not by itself tell us what that society will eventually believe was right.

That distinction matters when we move from colonial history into the modern Caribbean. Consider cannabis. On May 12, 1983, Belizean Prime Minister George Cadle Price met with U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the White House, and the two governments discussed Belize’s efforts to suppress marijuana cultivation. Reagan specifically praised the Price government’s campaign against cannabis, describing marijuana as a threat to both societies. At the time, the political language surrounding cannabis was overwhelmingly one of suppression, eradication and criminal enforcement. (The American Presidency Project)

The world has since changed considerably. Cannabis remains prohibited in many jurisdictions, but other jurisdictions have legalized or regulated parts of the industry, creating commercial markets around cultivation, processing, research, medicine and adult use. Belize has also moved into a more complicated policy conversation of its own, including efforts to establish a regulated framework for cannabis-related activities. The important point is not whether every cannabis policy is good or bad; it is that something that could once place a poor farmer, grower or street-level seller in conflict with the criminal law can, under a different legal framework, become part of a regulated economic sector.

That creates an uncomfortable question about who gets to participate when an illicit economy becomes a legitimate one. The corporations arrive with capital, lawyers, accountants, technology and regulatory expertise, while people who may have spent years operating within the underground economy can find themselves excluded from the new legal market because they lack financing, education, licensing experience or a clean record. A change in law can therefore create a strange historical inversion: the commodity remains, the market remains and sometimes even the demand remains, but the people who absorbed the risk under prohibition are not necessarily the people positioned to benefit from legalization or regulation.

This is why conversations about restorative justice should not be limited to the language of punishment. If society decides that an economic activity should be regulated differently, then it should at least examine the consequences for the people who were criminalized under the previous system. That does not mean automatically granting licenses to everyone who participated in an illegal market, and it certainly does not mean erasing conduct that harmed other people. It means asking whether education, financial assistance, licensing support, business development, record relief where legally appropriate and other forms of economic inclusion can help people move from an underground economy into a legitimate one.

The same principle becomes even more complicated when we talk about gangs. Underground economies are still economies, and organized criminal groups do not exist solely because individual people wake up one morning and decide that crime is an attractive career. Poverty, exclusion, neighborhood conditions, family circumstances, drug markets, access to weapons, weak institutions and the absence of legitimate economic opportunities can interact in ways that make criminal networks durable. None of those conditions excuses violence, extortion, murder or exploitation, but understanding the environment in which those behaviors develop is essential if the objective is actually to prevent them rather than simply respond after the fact.

There is also a tendency to focus almost entirely on the person at the bottom of the structure. The young man carrying a weapon or selling drugs is visible, while the financial networks, property owners, suppliers, intermediaries and people with greater economic power who may benefit from an illicit market can be considerably less visible. That distinction matters because enforcement can become most severe against the people who are easiest to identify and replace, while the larger economic structure continues operating. If we are serious about crime prevention, then we have to be serious about understanding the entire economy surrounding crime, not merely the person standing on the corner.

Belize has already experienced the difficulty of trying to address this problem through direct engagement with gangs. In 2011, following a period of serious violence in Belize City, Prime Minister Dean Barrow met with representatives of major gangs in an attempt to establish a truce. Government representatives, police officials, the Belize Defence Force and the Conscious Youth Development Project were involved in the discussions, and the government proposed employment through infrastructure projects as part of the arrangement. The meetings themselves were heavily secured, including searches for weapons, which is an important detail because it demonstrates that engagement and security were being treated as simultaneous responsibilities rather than mutually exclusive choices. (Amandala)

The subsequent program involved hundreds of participants and government-funded employment. By the end of December 2011, Amandala reported that 225 people were participating in the gang-truce work program, while another 60 were employed through the Conscious Youth Development Program, with approximately $880,000 spent across the truce and related programs since August. Barrow publicly associated the truce with a reduction in gang-related killings, although the arrangement was explicitly fragile and later faced serious challenges. (Amandala)

That history is important because it shows both the possibility and the limitations of the approach. You cannot simply pay people to stop fighting and assume that the underlying social and economic structure has disappeared. A temporary employment program can create breathing room, but if people return to the same neighborhoods, the same poverty, the same limited opportunities, the same criminal networks and the same incentives, the underlying problem remains. Rehabilitation requires something more ambitious than a ceasefire; it requires a credible alternative social and economic structure.

This is where I would approach the problem differently. If the state is serious about giving people a way out of organized violence, I would want the leaders and influential members of those organizations to see, in concrete terms, what another life could look like. I would want them to see the Belize Defence Force, its facilities, its training structure, its housing possibilities, its educational opportunities and the benefits available to people who enter legitimate national service under properly established rules. The purpose would not be to reward criminality or automatically turn gang members into soldiers, but to demonstrate that the same country in which they learned to command a street can offer them a legitimate institution in which their capacity for leadership can be redirected.

There is something particularly powerful about that proposition in a country as small as Belize. A gang may fight over a few streets, a neighborhood or a particular territory, but the nation itself is the larger territory that needs to be protected, developed and built. Someone who has learned how to organize people, navigate difficult environments, understand local geography, manage logistics or command attention possesses capabilities that can potentially be redirected into lawful employment, provided that there is rigorous screening, training, accountability and a complete separation from criminal activity. The same principle could apply outside the military, because not everyone who needs a way out belongs in the BDF; some people could be directed toward construction, agriculture, maritime work, logistics, technology, entrepreneurship, public works or skilled trades.

That distinction is crucial because rehabilitation cannot simply mean changing someone’s uniform. You cannot take an organized criminal structure, place it inside a government institution and declare the problem solved. Any legitimate reintegration program would have to protect the public and the institution through background checks, professional standards, supervision, training, consequences for corruption and clear mechanisms for removing people who violate those standards. The purpose would be to transfer human capacity into legitimate institutions, not to transfer criminal networks into them.

This also brings us back to the Caribbean conversation about reparations. It is reasonable for Caribbean societies to ask former colonial powers to confront the economic and social consequences of slavery, extraction and colonial rule, but restorative justice becomes a much more meaningful concept when societies are also willing to examine what happens within their own borders. We should be willing to ask who has been excluded from capital, who has been pushed outside the formal economy, who grows up with limited access to legitimate opportunity, who carries the consequences of criminal records and who is positioned to benefit when previously prohibited markets become legitimate industries.

Those questions do not require us to pretend that historical slavery and contemporary gang violence are the same thing. They are not. They require us to recognize a broader principle: systems can produce consequences that outlive the moment in which the system was created. A person can be born into circumstances shaped by decisions made long before he was born, and by the time society tells him to make better choices, the legitimate alternatives may be considerably weaker than the alternatives available through the underground economy.

If we want people to make different choices, therefore, we have to build different choices. That means education, housing, healthcare, job training, access to banking, credit, entrepreneurship, mentorship and family support, but it also means building institutions that can absorb people who have previously been excluded from them. It is a generational project because the objective is not simply to change the behavior of one adult; it is to change what the next child growing up in that environment believes is possible.

That kind of investment requires responsibility from more than government. Businesses have a role because companies determine who receives employment, financing and commercial opportunity; schools have a role because education determines what possibilities become accessible; churches and community organizations have a role because they often remain present where formal institutions are weakest; and families have a role because social expectations are formed long before a person enters the workforce. The state cannot outsource all of this responsibility, but neither can the state solve it alone.

There is also a difficult psychological component to restorative justice: sometimes society has to be willing to allow a person to become something other than the worst thing he has ever done. That does not mean forgetting victims, minimizing violence or removing legitimate consequences. It means recognizing that permanent exclusion can become its own form of social policy, particularly when a person has no realistic path back into the legitimate economy after serving a sentence or attempting to leave a criminal organization.

History should make us especially careful about the idea that certain people are simply disposable. Societies have repeatedly created categories of people whose suffering could be rationalized because their position was considered necessary to preserve some larger conception of order, whether those people were enslaved, criminalized, impoverished, politically marginalized or excluded from economic participation. The categories change across time, but the temptation to treat certain people as permanently outside the circle of concern can remain remarkably consistent.

That is why the history of law matters. The law can protect people, establish order and punish conduct that genuinely harms others, but the law also reflects the values, institutions and power structures of the period in which it is written. When those conditions change, the law can change with them, and when the law changes, society has to decide whether it is willing to confront the consequences that accumulated under the previous system.

So when we discuss cannabis, perhaps the question should not only be what is legal now. We should also ask who paid when it was illegal, who accumulated wealth from the prohibition economy, who was criminalized, who remains excluded from the emerging legitimate economy and what mechanisms could allow those communities to participate in a lawful future.

When we discuss gangs, perhaps the question should not only be how many arrests can be made or how many weapons can be removed from the streets. We should also ask what legitimate institution could offer a young person enough dignity, security, education and economic opportunity that the gang no longer represents his most powerful available identity.

And when we discuss reparations and restorative justice, perhaps the conversation should not only look backward toward the colonial past. It should also look inward at the systems we are operating today and ask whether we are reproducing exclusion in contemporary forms, even while demanding that other societies acknowledge the exclusions of their own histories.

The objective should not be to make yesterday’s underground economy respectable. It should be to make tomorrow’s legitimate economy accessible to people who have historically been denied meaningful access to it. That requires accountability, but it also requires imagination, because a society cannot punish its way into a future in which the conditions producing violence have disappeared.

Perhaps that is the question we should leave ourselves with: when the law changes, who gets left behind? If an activity becomes legitimate after generations of criminalization, who gets to participate in the new economy? If a person decides that he wants to leave a life of violence, have we actually built a road that allows him to leave, or have we merely told him that he should find one?

The Caribbean has an opportunity to think about these questions differently. We can acknowledge the reality of crime without surrendering the people involved in it, protect victims without abandoning rehabilitation, and pursue national security without pretending that economic exclusion has nothing to do with social instability. The work is difficult, expensive and generational, but if restorative justice is going to mean anything beyond a historical slogan, it has to include the people living inside the societies we are trying to repair.

The country is the turf. The question is whether we are prepared to build a country worth choosing.