articles


21 deportees graduate sewing and business course
BY LUKE DOUGLAS Career & Education writer, Jamaica Observer, Sunday, August 01, 2010 WHEN Coleen Dyer was deported to Jamaica from the United Kingdom in 2004, she felt her life had hit rock bottom. But on July 28, the 33-year-old mother of four was feeling good about herself again. Armed with a certificate from the HEART/NTA Garmex Academy, ...


Mother of four struggles to survive after deportation
BY PETRE WILLIAMS-RAYNOR Jamaica Observer, Sunday, August 01, 2010 AT 43 years old, Rosemarie has experienced unimaginable misery. Still, she refuses to lose hope. In the last decade alone, she was imprisoned for trafficking cocaine, gone close to death's door, due in part to depression, and known what it is like to be homeless.As though that were not enough, ...


Rate of drug shipment to Ghana becoming worse – Bartels
Accra Daily Mail, 26/10/07 Mr Kwamena Bartels, Minister of  Interior on Wednesday bemoaned the rate at which massive quantities of drugs, were being shipped into the country and said government would make the necessary amendments to. PNDCL 236 to deal with the current trends. He said the situation was as a result of the increased efforts of ...


Jamaican women in UK prisons
by Olga Heaven, The Weekly Gleaner (UK ), 18/04/01 At the moment there are over 350 Jamaican women in UK prisons, 60 per cent of the foreign national women currently held here, mostly for smuggling drugs into the country. Despite harsh sentences of up to 15 years the women keep coming in ever-greater numbers. Most of these ...


Need for more balanced reporting on Jamaica
by Olga Heaven 25/09/02  The Weekly Gleaner ( U.K. ) The media in Europe and America have the habit of making their citizens think that Jamaica is a war zone which is a grave danger. The 'documentary' featuring Kingston Public Hospital   shown   here   on prime time, for example, was like the American sitcom Mash without ...


‘Race’, ethnicity and crime
Olga Heaven and Barbara Hudson INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationships between 'race', 'ethnicity' and 'crime', and we shall examine how these conflated and complex terms are used interchangeably. There is a considerable body of empirical research in the UK and elsewhere that illustrates the extent to which people from minority ethnic ...


ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Global Eye on Human Traffiking, 5 May 2009 Olga Heaven spoke to the Global Eye team about the deception and exploitation of drug mules, and about the link between illicit drug importation and human trafficking. How are people generally recruited into being drug mules? They are recruited in different ways depending on the country, and depending on ...


Long sentences for drug mules were never going to act as a deterrent
The Guardian, Thursday 14 May 2009 These naive smugglers are typically badly educated single mothers coerced into crime, says Olga Heaven It was heartening to read that prison sentences for "drug mules" - men and women who are used to carry drugs into the UK - could be reduced to less than two years (Long jail terms ...