"You gat me sitting down in a cell for most of the day. What I gat to lose?"
His searing question crackles like a lit fire-cracker with just minutes until its inevitable explosion. It singes the walls and the mind, exacting an answer from those who think that they have one. With burning pupils and a voice that rasps questions and thunders their answers, Isaac, 50, is every cell mate that he spent his two year sentence with at Her Majesty's Prison, Fox Hill, before his release last September.
He is the needy little boy whose parents forgot to tell him that he was special, that the world was his and that he could do anything he put his mind to. He is the 15-year old half-hardened by the lack of expectations society and his own parents have for him and even he has for himself. Raped of any sliver of self-confidence long ago, at the age when all kids feel that their dreams could only come true, his were suffocated by the overwhelming feeling that nobody seemed to care. If they had, they had never shown it, at least not in a way that he could be sure of.
As his voice gets louder, he grows into the young man who has tossed aside books and school knowledge because it made no sense on the streets that nurtured him when family didn't realise that their role was being usurped.
With the tip of that very first domino, everything else in his life would fall, pushing against each other with an almost irreversible wind of hopelessness. With the clink of the last domino, a once free man was behind bars.
"As a child gets older, moves out on the street, the best love and attention or caring that they had probably was a bigger brother on the streets who was probably selling drugs, making money and helping him to buy a pants or shirt," Isaac explains. The first few chips fall. Then incarceration.
"Society will knock you down as a teenager and wouldn't contribute to the elevation of you achieving life skills and different vocational training so that when they release you, you will have some type of avenue to follow. But you end up right there on the streets and the only person who'll help you on the streets is another brother who on the streets," he goes on. The collision course of dominoes continues.
With one more chip left standing, the choice seems easy, obvious even. You can turn away from your burgeoning criminal career, but you have already discarded your books and school and you never really learned to believe in yourself. Suddenly your options seem dimmer than a lone light bulb in a smoky room. Just like that, you are one shot, one armed robbery away from becoming a recidivism statistic.
Even "if you want to stop your foolishness you are not qualified for anything," says Isaac, speaking for the young men he observed during his incarceration. "If you are not qualified for anything but street life, what do you have to resort to?"
"I'll kill somebody"
It is easy to fire a weapon in a community that has no room for you. Violence, an interpretation of human behaviour that is considered antisocial and can be stimulated by a variety of things, says world-renowned teacher, and prolific author, Dr. Myles Munroe, among other things, is a result of the interaction of a human with his environment.
One of the reasons why violence increases in society is "because people feel detached from a society. (They) feel isolated, not valued by society," he says. "They feel the need to act in certain ways to get attention.
"Sometimes people can be placed on the fringes of society by society and so they react to being placed on the outside of society in negative ways that they consider to be a way of getting attention or expressing their anger at that society."
Violence can stem from the frustration of perceived societal exclusion for one reason or another.
"Sources and causes of violence," Dr. Munroe says, "are usually related to conditions in society that gravitate against a sense of feeling integrated in that society. It is a result of people feeling frustrated that they cannot participate in that society or they cannot deliver what the society is demanding from them.
"If you don't educate a young group of people then you demand that they act educated or that they perform activities that demand education, you frustrate them. They respond to your demands with frustration that results in violent activities."
In a world where a daily diet of violence in popular culture is eaten up like popcorn at a movie theatre, it seems harder and harder to shock, perturb or outrage. Images of violence take on a benign veneer in their profusion. Talk of carnage becomes blasé. Another generation becomes jaded and life soon seems as valueless as a crumpled paper cup.
Says clinical psychologist and school psychologist at the Ministry of Education, Dr. Pamula Mills, "We're seeing children nowadays coming forth (and) you ask them what would you do if you could change things and they say, 'I'll kill somebody' - these things are starting from... childhood in the homes."
A little society called 'home'
Largely products of their environment, children play out in their lives what is modelled before them from their earliest memory and training. Many experts agree that the first place of learning is in the home.
Although it can sometimes be attributed to genetic factors "violence is learned behaviour," says Dr. Mills. "For the most part if you have a violent community or a violent household then you have violent kids."
While violence can result from a societal environment that does not make people feel that they are important or that their contributions are valuable to that community, violence itself is a sign that the first level of society has failed, says Dr. Munroe.
"The first level of society is the home. "Every home is a small society," says Dr. Munroe. "So when you fail in the home you'll fail in society and so violence really begins in the home and violence can only be solved in the home."
Having respect for your children and your household and setting a good example for children in actions that speak volumes over words, sets the pace in the home, expresses R.B.P.F. Assistant Commissioner, Ellison Greenslade.
"This is not an old story, it's not about being old-fashioned, it's just about simple basic rules." Societal reform begins in the home.
"We go right back to this fundamental issue of how we are managing our families. First and foremost how we manage ourselves how we manage our families and are we demonstrating the level of concern. Are we showing the appropriate amount of care, respect and trust to our children and to our relatives," he questions. "Before we even step into the wider arena of society we should ask those questions.
"This is very doable, I don't think that we are too far gone," says the senior law enforcement officer. "But it's going to have to be done one family at a time. You're not going to wake up in The Bahamas one morning and someone waves his magic wand and suddenly we've got it right. It's not going to happen like that. There is no magical cure." What there is, says Mr. Greenslade, is the basic tenet of love.
"Nurturing the human spirit"
If you don't hug your 15 year-old-son and tell him that you love him then, Mr. Greenslade asks frankly, "who's going to tell him? At what age do we stop hugging and kissing and affirming our sons," he says specifically to men. "It takes a tremendous effort because you're so busy doing everything else that you never stop and say to that child, 'I'm really proud of you,' looking him in the eye, put your arms on him and touch him because people like to be touched, hugged and nurtured.
"There must be something to be said about nurturing the human spirit."
Failing to affirm children in the home can make them a lot more vulnerable to what lurks outside its safe walls. "I prefer to tell them in the house," says Mr. Greenslade of affirming children, "than to have someone tell them in the street and steal my kid from me."
In over 24 years of observations in his field of law enforcement, Mr. Greenslade chalks reform all up to nurturing the human spirit - taking care of each other, communicating, showing affection and resolving our differences peacefully. "Where love exists violence can't," he says.
Purpose leads to discipline - the opposite of violence
"If you don't understand the purpose of a thing you will abuse it," says Dr. Munroe quoting one of his favourite lines in his book on the subject.
"A person who participates in antisocial behaviour with no regard for law and order is a person who has not (discovered) the contribution that he is supposed to make to building society. So the most important thing that anyone can discover in life to prevent them from being a negative component of society is their purpose."
Purpose, he defines, is the original reason for your existence. It is discovering why you were born, the meaning for your life.
"When a person captures that, suddenly everything in life becomes important. If you feel that you are not important or valuable, everything else feels that way. If you feel that you are important, you treat everybody else that way." When a person discovers their purpose they discover discipline, says Dr. Munroe. And "discipline is the opposite of violence."
Conflict resolution,
without the guns
Recent events of senseless acts of violence that dominate the news not only shed a blood-tinged light on an apparent lack of value for life, but an inability or refusal to find ways of peacefully resolving conflicts.
Dr. Mills calls the failure to resolve conflicts calmly one of the biggest contributors to violence in society.
"People don't know how to resolve conflicts amicably and because of that instead of talking things through... people are resorting to confronting people in a physical manner that may sometimes lead to death."
Will your children learn to solve conflicts the same way that you do? There is a good chance that they might. Says Dr. Mills, we don't understand the affect that constant fighting and arguing to resolve conflicts can have on the smallest child.
"We're not stopping to talk to one another, everybody has pent up emotions," says the psychologist.
Dr. Mills admits that there are other societal stressors that can lead to frustration that can in turn breed violence. High rates of unemployment, post-traumatic stress from the string of hurricanes, mass tragedy are all among them.
"When you add all of these things together, people are just not thinking very clearly and instead of sitting down and trying to get themselves together, they're just acting on impulse." Yet such spur of the moment induced violence can be replaced with conflict resolution.
"It's a nationwide thing and in lieu of the (prison break) we really need to get on the ball in dealing with conflict resolution. We really need to tell people you have to stop and take some introspection," she says. The psychologist has pledged to embark on this better way in the schools with conflict resolution classes she hopes to begin this year.
The resolution of violence in society lies within the grasp of all of its citizens. Active citizenship - citizenship where individuals take an active role in community building and own up to personal responsibility - is one large step towards the goal, Mr. Greenslade demonstrates.
He is thrilled with the new and improved relationship that he says that many of his officers now have with people in the community who have chosen to play such an active role.
"The appeal must be for citizens all over The Bahamas (to exercise) responsible citizenship," says the Assistant Commissioner. "You must take an active role in community building, an active role in ensuring that The Bahamas is safe and secure for all of us."
Education
While the present education system that emphasizes the academics so necessary for success in the job world is good, Dr. Munroe believes that as a revision of the system to focus on "rediscovering self, self worth and self esteem" is more crucial.
"If we build these things first then academic education has a meaning," he explains. "Once we get meaning in our lives then we will see violence subside."
Convinced that the H.M.P compound is an incubator for breeding more hardened criminals, Isaac feels that a regularised system of work should be made mandatory and that inmates should be taught vocational skills on its premises. Harsher measures behind its walls, he says, are not the answer. What happens when the prisoners become immune to such measures, he questions.
"If these people adapt and adjust to (harsher measures), the tougher they get." The mental hardening, he says, leads to lack of value for life and violence on the outside.
"Put something in these people hands what they could lose, what they're going to feel," says Isaac of education. "Give them training that they wouldn't want to let go," he says noting that his own qualifications are his strength and work that he depended on after his release.
If things remain the same, Isaac fears of societal attitudes towards inmates in and out of prison, "you creating that monster."