The people of Trinidad and Tobago are angry, almost bloodthirsty, demanding that something be done about a crime situation gone out of control. The fearful state of affairs is a result of an entire decade of moral decay — our murder rates have been increasing rapidly since the year 2000, and show no sign of stopping. Every day brings with it new stories of the blood of the people spilled on their own soil.

The people want blood in return, and our current government is planning to give it to them. In early 2011, they introduced the Capital Offences Bill, seeking to categorise murder, allow for mandatory death sentencing for those convicted of the highest category of murder, and circumvent the Pratt and Morgan ruling that states that a man must be executed within five years on Death Row.

This begs a question, though — Is this how our nation gets better?

And not enough people seem to be asking the question. Those who lost loved ones due to violent crime want no more than vengeance upon the convicted. To those with no losses, the debate doesn't interest them.

To the political minds of the nation, going with what the people want is all too beneficial for them to give it thought. But if we don't pay attention to the reality of the death penalty, not only here but worldwide, we stand to be sorely disappointed.

We are quick to say that the death penalty would solve our crime problem, ignoring our problems with how justice is even administered. There's still a great distrust in the Police Service and their capability to do their job, which is to catch the criminals in the first place, among them the murderers we would seek to execute. Then, they are subjected to a terribly long judicial process, for which the conviction rate is already dangerously low. In fact, a local study done in 2005 by Roger Hood and Florence Seemungal showed that 80 per cent of persons charged for killing a person were neither convicted for murder or manslaughter, and only one in five persons indicted for murder were convicted in that year.

The study also showed that the majority of persons successfully convicted of murder did not commit "the worst of the worst'' murders, but were in fact convicted as a result of domestic disputes.

Our current Government makes the claim that the hanging bill is intended to better punish those who are definitively our worst murderers, but that's not a reality of our justice system. More importantly, fixing our judicial system would make the death penalty unnecessary and giving way to a much stronger deterrent to crime — the likelihood that people can get caught.

In 2011, Kamla Persad-Bissessar stated that since 2000 (the year after we executed Dole Chadee) our crime rate has been increasing rapidly. She quotes it as a statistic for us to return to the death penalty, when it is more likely proof of something much more sinister.

We executed ten persons in 1999, after not applying the death penalty for ten years before. If the death penalty was supposed to scare persons away from murder, how is it that right after a record number of executions our crime rate rose higher than three years before?

Our Prime Minister also missed a very important statistic in the debate on the death penalty in T&T — the fact that our crime rate was steadily decreasing for the ten years before we executed in 1999, and then it started rising.

Good governance is about good solutions. That is a lot more important than the shortcut answers that it's already in the nation's laws and it's what the people want. Creating clever initiatives that actually get results is what will benefit our Government and our nation in the long run. We citizens should demand it from our Government, and our Government should be invested in giving it to us.

More importantly, the spirit of the Trinidad and Tobago Constitution should be upholding morals and values in line with the inherent rights of all human beings, and the State should seek to uphold that at all times, instead of making constitutional exceptions.

There are problems with our education system that do not empower students who learn differently from others, and a grave unemployment problem that does not allow completely for semi-skilled labourers. Only superficial attention is paid to at-risk communities and "hot spot'' areas, which still carry a stigma that not even the Government attempts to erase.

Where are the bills to deal with these issues in Parliament? If the Government is using the death penalty as an example of being "hard on crime'' then the wool is being pulled over our eyes to blind us from the true issues that they need to get a handle on.

• Brendon O'Brien is an activist on matters ranging from sexual and reproductive health and rights to youth issues in T&T, and is the founder of the "Doh Do Death'' project.