As the plane descended through tropical sky, and Caribbean surf gave way to Kingston’s rooftops, lumps formed in the passengers’ throats. After years or even decades away, they were back in Jamaica, the land of their birth. But if there were tears as the plane landed at Norman Manley airport, they were not of joy. Few if any of the 31 passengers wanted to be on what was no ordinary chartered flight. This was “Con Air” and they were deported former criminals.
Having completed jail sentences in the United States for offences from drug dealing to bank robbery, they had been expelled from their adopted country to an impoverished homeland many had left as children.
“It’s messed up, my being here,” said Dwayne Cousins (25) a week after disembarking from the March 23 flight. Muscular, tattooed and speaking with a Texas drawl, the former Houston resident and cocaine peddler felt marooned. “I’ve never seen anything like this, the poverty. You can’t make nothing of yourself here.”
Courtney Francis (41) a crack cocaine dealer from New York with 16 children in the US, predicted that most of his co-passengers would lapse into crime. He gestured to an empty beach with a shantytown in the distance. “The economy here sucks. What are we supposed to do?”
It is an increasingly urgent question. Every month the so-called Con Air flight scoops dozens of Jamaican-born convicts who have completed time in US jails and dumps them in Kingston. Dozens more arrive monthly from Britain on British Airways and Air Jamaica flights from Gatwick and Heathrow.
The US, United Kingdom and Canada account for almost all of the 33 268 Jamaicans who have been deported in the past 15 years. The rising numbers reflect a political imperative to crack down on illegal immigrants and foreign criminals.
For Jamaica the influx is deeply unwelcome and a cause of the island’s crime boom, the government claims. “There is a strong sustained relationship between the deportation of violent criminal offenders and increases in violent crimes,” said a recent national Security Ministry report. Its data suggests that once back in Jamaica, most of the deportees reoffend, helping to drive the number of murders from 542 in 1990 to 1 674 in 2005, one of the world’s highest per capita rates.
Gangs such as the Yardies, Yankees, Rude Boys and Thugs are dominated by returnees skilled in extortion and violence and with a network of overseas contacts, according to Rohan James, a beat policeman in west Kingston. “Most, if not all, are headed by deportees.”
Resentful
Last week an Old Bailey court continued the flow: Calvin Barry, an illegal Jamaican immigrant, was jailed for 10 years for manslaughter and conspiracy to rob and was recommended for deportation.
Arrivals are often resentful and lack friends or family on the island, the security ministry reports. “They see themselves as outcasts who are not wanted in the deporting country, but who do not have a home to which to return.” Politicians and commentators denounce them as failures and dangers, a disdain echoed in the jokey reference to second-hand imported Japanese cars as “deportees”.
The government has lobbied deporting countries to slow the flow, arguing that arrivals often use their contacts to export crime back to the country which banished them.
“When England sent me here I was one angry person. I wanted to flood your country with drugs,” said Evelyn Mason (50) a former Yardie expelled in 1994 after serving time for kidnapping and grievous bodily harm. “When the English deport someone they think that’s the end of the problem. It’s not, it’s just started. A deportee can be like a wounded animal and want to retaliate.”
With a system to greet and rehabilitate them, however, deportees can integrate and become law-abiding citizens, said Mason. Since discovering religion she has become a lay preacher and now runs a charity, Land of My Birth, which helps deportees to find work and accommodation.
Mason, known as “Fat Pam”, a ferocious gangster in her heyday, is still formidable and respected by deportees. “A small proportion are irredeemable, but most are very nice people and just want to have a quiet life,” she said.
When the arrivals troop through the airport they are often met with stony stares from the police and immigration officials. Senior gangsters sometimes have flashy cars waiting for them, but others arrive destitute and uncertain about how to contact relatives.
Mason, whose organisation works with the national security ministry, is also at the airport and provides food, a hygiene kit and an orientation speech which entails telling her own story of redemption. “I shake their hand, look them in the eye and say ‘welcome home’. They feel the love.”
In recent years Britain has spent millions training, equipping and funding its former colony’s police force. The investment appeared to pay off last year with a 20% dip in murders, though the bloodshed has since picked up again. To what extent deportees drive the violence remains an open question.
Shunned
Some analysts such as Bernard Headley, a criminology professor at the University of the West Indies, believe they are not to blame for the mayhem, a view shared by one British official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “A lot of the ones we send back are not hardened criminals, but people who overstayed their visas.”
Many of the drug offenders are not gangsters, but “mules”, such as Pauline Jackson (45) a large, softly-spoken mother of five from a Kingston slum who was offered £2 500 to smuggle 41 cocaine pellets through Gatwick. She was caught and after two years and six months in jail returned home broke, stigmatised and shunned by her eldest two children, a common plight for women accused of abandoning offspring. “I made a mistake and I’m still paying the price,” said Jackson.
Traffickers recruit women in the run up to Christmas and the start of school term, when families are under most financial pressure, according to Hibiscus, a British-funded charity which helps such women to start afresh with clothing, food parcels and small loans. “When returnees come back things have changed,” said Solomon Omega, a project manager. “Children have grown, maybe their house is an empty shell, and they have nothing.” – Guardian Unlimited Â