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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Olga Heaven and Barbara Hudson

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.

Cumberland Lodge, The Great Park, Windsor
Overcrowding affects every aspect of a prison regime, reducing safety and inhibiting efforts at resettlement and rehabilitation. Despite a massive increase in prison places in recent years, chronic overcrowding continues to be the most damaging feature of the prison estate.
This conference will:

Identify the factors that [...]

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 [...]