"Beyond Bars" Resettlement, Reintegration & Rehabilitation

21st - 22nd Febuary 2005, Kingston Jamaica

BACKGROUND

The location for the second conference on Foreign National Women in UK Prisons is Jamaica, the Caribbean island of approximately eleven thousand square kilometres, with a population of 2.7 million, a median age of 26 years, of whom 30% are under fourteen. Despite its reputation as a paradise island, Jamaica is home to high levels of poverty and inequality which in turn have led to the existence of a brutal drug trade and one of the highest murder rates in the world.

For more than a decade the economy has experienced minor negative growth, with an unemployment rate in 2002 of over 15%, external debt of US$5.3 billion, and trade deficit of US$1.7 billion, mostly for food and manufactured goods. Over 34% of the population live below the poverty line, the top 10% earn over 30% above the average household income, while the bottom 10% earn less than 3%. The attacks on the American twin towers and the Pentagon seriously affected the tourist industry which provides employment to the majority of the 60% of the population who work in the service sector.

Women have suffered most; although 75% of University students are women, who receive 82% of first class degrees, and literacy rates are higher among women (92%) than men (84%), Jamaica remains a patriarchal society where men, call the shots.

Most Jamaican households are headed by women, unemployed because of sexual discrimination or the fact that they need to take care of children. The lack of an effective system of social welfare means that such women are vulnerable to the attentions of the dominant male hierarchy as they seek some means to take care of their children. With increasing urbanisation there is also no safety net in the rural extended family which once took care of children while single mothers worked in town.

In the ‘downtown’ ghettos such women became easy targets for drug dealers who controlled the neighbourhoods as these were effectively no-go areas for police or government officials. Many women were deceived or coerced into transporting drugs to the UK with the assurance that they would simply be deported back to Jamaica if caught.

The introduction of long ‘deterrent’ sentences in the UK during the mid-1980s means that the prisons here were becoming filled up with multitudes of Jamaican women who, at their peak, numbered over 700. The first conference, organised by Hibiscus in September 2001 to address the problem, concentrated on the failure of the ‘deterrent’ policy and made recommendations based upon the findings that women would continue to act out of desperation as long as abject poverty persisted, and that information about the futility of drug smuggling was a far more effective deterrent than ten year prison sentences. Increased co-operation between the two governments and a massive publicity campaign have resulted in a dramatic reduction in arrests and prison numbers, but the problems faced by foreign women in prison remain the same, many Jamaican women will not be released for at least another three years and other nationalities will replace them as the drug barons look for easier targets.

The second conference in February 2005 examined the problems created by the return of hundreds of women to conditions far worse than those which led them to offend when they left Jamaica three or more years ago. Unless these problems are addressed, and solutions sought, the women, or especially their children, may fall again into temptation. more