Fostering a Culture of Lawfulness

Fixing Jamaica’s Normalised Abnormalities

Jamaican society has many ‘broken windows’ in the form of social abnormalities that have been normalized. Regrettably, under self-government since 1962 Jamaica has evolved into an undisciplined society, and, reflecting the abject failure of the authorities to maintain law and order, chaos and disorder have overtaken public spaces in major towns and on the roads. Because there is a link between pervasive lawlessness and national prosperity, fixing the problem must be prioritized. Under the ‘social contract’ that Thomas Hobbes articulated in ‘Leviathan’ in the mid-1600s, the maintenance of law and order is the first responsibility of a government. In this well-researched and cogently argued publication, the author calls on the Jamaican Government to foster a culture of lawfulness through consistent and fair enforcement of the corpus of laws enacted to regulate the conduct of citizens and the overall public administration of the country.