Archibald, who boasts decades of teaching experience is suggesting, as he has done time and again, that the solution to youth crime is to place uneducated and misguided youths in a structured environment and “reeducate them”.
“Our country is going through a horrendous crisis and I believe I have the solution to some of those crises. The recent problem with crime, I believe if the government had listened to me, we would not have had this wave of crime. One of the things I said about a year ago was that I offered the government a solution for youth crime. I told the government that the thing to do was to encamp all youngsters who dropped out of school who were unemployed to enroll them in a camping experience; take them out of their homes, put them in a camp and reeducate them. Because in my mind the reason for the serious crime in this country among the youth is that the youth were not educated properly.”
In an interview with MiyVue, Archibald explained his belief that crime stems from a divided society which is an extension of the education system.
“Our education system has produced a divided society, it has educated some youth to the highest level at the public’s expense. You could get free education to the highest level if…if…you were bright and talented. If you come from a home where your parents are sensitive to your well being, that is the if you come from a home where your mother was a teenaged girl when she got you, where she has to work as a servant girl or work over at the Marriott in the night, if you come from that sort of home you are at a disadvantage at school. So you have a free high school but some children are advantaged and they make use of the schooling, some are disadvantaged, they do not get the benefit of the schooling and I believe that most of the criminals in St. Kitts…men and women…are the boys and girls who we did not educate properly.”
Archibald expressed that his appeals to the government to create a structured environment for misguided and educated youths seem to have fallen on deaf ears. He opined that had these calls been heeded, “We would not have had this wave of crime.”
“So there is need now that we see the devastation that these youth are wreaking on this country, it is necessary for us to go back over the education, take them back in and put them back in the school where they would learn not the same kind of thing they learned when they were pre-teenagers but they will learn an education and the most important part of this education must be that they must learn respect for themselves and for the rest of the community. So that you are going to train them in community service, you will keep them encamped, they will only go home once a week if they are well-behaved.
Speaking more to the camp concept, Archibald explained that once enrolled, students would be engaged in specific activities which would bring out the features of self respect, respect for others and love their country in their character.
Archibald says the current state of crime in the Federation is “the fault of our leadership because a simple thing like enrolling youngsters in a camp would have prevented them from marauding the country and just shooting. We have a community here now of blood-thirsty young fellows. Young fellows who have blood on their hands…Our society right now is almost hopeless…and the reason for this hopelessness is the unwillingness of the government to act to prevent it. This could have been prevented if 10-12 years ago when I started the Project Strong, they had started similar movements around the country side to take up these boys off the street.”