Jamaica’s generally low incarceration rate is in part responsible, for the country’s high murder rate, according to lead researcher at the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI), Dian Thorburn.

Thorburn made the observation last Tuesday at the public launch of a European Union-backed study titled “Hits and Misses: Women in Organised Violence’. Challenging the narrative and reality of the Jamaican gangstress’.

The study found that while Jamaican women are not generally involved in violent crime and as such are not the ones pulling the trigger, they nonetheless perform multiple and important roles in violent gangs.

Thorburn highlighted that despite a proliferation of gangs in Jamaica the country has one of lowest imprisonment rates in the hemisphere.

“This is in a context where there’s an empirical relationship between incarceration rates and murder rates, meaning that there’s a negative correlation between the number of homicides and the number of people in prison in Jamaica,” Thorburn explained.

“The more people in prison, the lower [the rate of] homicides, the fewer people in prison, the higher the homicide rate. This is an empirically-observed phenomenon in Jamaica over the past two decades,” she added. Thorburn said this means that many criminals, male and female are simply not in prison.

She told the launch that “the most prevalent form of domestic violence committed by women in Jamaica is violence against children”. She noted that women’s involvement in serious violent crime is marginal. In 2021, less than three per cent of those arrested and charged for category one crimes – murders, shootings, assault, larceny and robbery were women. For murders, women accounted for just two per cent of all arrests.

Thorburn said CAPRI was unable to find a single case of a woman pulling the trigger in a gang-related homicide.

“Even in police killings, there’s been only one known [case] of a woman fatally shooting someone; that happened in 2018,” she said.

In 2024, women made up four per cent of arrests involving gang members. However, there was no prior year to compare this number with to determine whether it represents an increase or a decline.

Of note is that across the globe, there is an increase in the number of women taking part in violent crime but this is not reflected in Jamaica. Elsewhere, women are participating at a higher rate, and being incarcerated at a higher rate than men in many countries, including in the Latin America and Caribbean region. Thorburn said the opposite was happening in the Caribbean, where female incarceration rates are holding steady or are on the decline, with Jamaica having one of the lowest incarceration rates in the entire hemisphere with only Haiti and Guatemala having lower numbers.

“Any assumption that Jamaica would be keeping with international trends of rising female criminality is not borne out by the data,” she stated.

The CAPRI director said the perception of Jamaican women being violent gangsters may be driven by a law enforcement perception bias where a few more women might be arrested and charged and this may be unusual, thus appearing to be a surge. She said media may also play a role where cases involving women are highly publicised, reinforcing the idea of a trend not reflected in the data.

Thorburn admitted that it was possible that women’s increasing role in violent crime was not fully captured by the data since women’s roles in crime are less visible and often under-reported or harder to detect.

Jamaica had an incarceration rate of 125 per 100,000 of a population of 2.85 million people as at July 2022, according to World Prison Brief.

At that time, four per cent of the incarcerated population was female, 5.4 per cent were juveniles. With an official capacity of 4,276, some 87 per cent of the space in penal institutions was occupied.

Often plagued with overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, 2009 saw the prisons bursting at the seams with an incarcerated population of 5,163 inmates.