CAPRI Commentaries

Rennique Thomas
Rennique Thomas
March 18, 2024

Prime Minister Andrew Holness, in a recent address to students and teachers, acknowledged the controversy surrounding the call for a total ban on corporal punishment (hitting/slapping/physical punishment). The National Commission for Violence Prevention, the entity established in 2019 and charged by the Prime Minister with developing recommendations to reduce the prevalence of various forms of violence in the country, has identified corporal punishment as a violation of the “personhood” of children and…

Dr. Damien King
Dr. Damien King
March 18, 2024

The evocative idea of the darkest hour being just before dawn was coined by Thomas Fuller almost 700 years ago, in his religious treatise, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine. While acceptable as a literary device, it is a literal inaccuracy since the darkest hour usually is around midnight. It nonetheless remains a powerful metaphor and an appropriate one to describe the Jamaican economy ten years ago, before it embarked on a widely-praised, path of fiscal and economic reform.

In 2013, the country’s public debt…

Yentyl Williams
Yentyl Williams
January 8, 2024

In 1891, Jamaica hosted its first globally publicized ‘International Exhibition’ to promote local products and attract investments to the island, inspired by the successes of exhibitions such as the London Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace (1851) and the Paris Great Exhibitions (1700-1800s). While the 1891 exhibition is seldom remembered, the London and Paris exhibitions continue to be studied in intellectual property courses the world over, as it was in this context—that of the Industrial Revolution—that intellectual property protections were first developed and…

Alexander Causwell
Alexander Causwell
July 6, 2023

CAPRI’s 2020 landmark study on Jamaica’s violent gangs, Guns Out: The Splintering of Jamaica’s Gangs , repeated the commonly held premise that Jamaica suffers from a “culture of violence.” Ongoing work in the security field has since prompted a reexamination of that hypothesis. A closer examination of the available evidence yields no indication that a distinct cultural propensity is responsible for Jamaica’s high rates of violence, particularly with respect to homicides. Rather, it is the enabling environment produced by specific policy decisions of…

Diana Thorburn, PHD
Diana Thorburn
June 23, 2023

“I am Catholic but I have to legislate for everyone,” proclaimed then-candidate Alberto Fernandez, in his campaign promise to reintroduce a bill to legalize abortion in Argentina. After winning the presidency, he fulfilled his commitment, and Argentina legalized abortion up to 14 weeks gestation in 2020. President Fernandez’s distinguishing between his personal beliefs and what he recognized as the human costs associated with the abortion ban, highlights that supporting the legalization of abortion does not equate to being pro-abortion.

Banning abortion does not stop women from getting them. In Jamaica, abortion is currently…