Costly crimes
Published:Monday | March 16, 2026 | 12:07 AM
It is costing Caribbean nations a combined US$190 billion to deal with the effects of crime and violence, an official at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has revealed.
Jason Wilks, senior sector specialist at the IDB, says this accounts for 3.7 per cent of gross domestic product for countries in the Caribbean.
Despite this, Wilks said Caribbean countries are spending “maybe US$15 billion to US$20 billion” on compliance.
“So, there is a real need for us to come up with solutions that work at the level of scale, and work at the level of efficiency, to address this monster,” said the IDB official.
He was addressing the closing ceremony for the inaugural regional capacity-building and training seminar on Joint Investigations Teams (JITs) held in Jamaica last month.
The five-day seminar was organised by the IDB and the Regional Security System (RSS) in its capacity as the Permanent Coordinating Secretariat for the Asset Recovery Inter-Agency Network for the Caribbean.
It brought together representatives from law-enforcement agencies, prosecutorial authorities, customs agencies, financial investigators, asset recovery entities, tax administration authorities and other government institutions from across the Caribbean.
Among the key areas that were covered are trends and types of illicit financial inflows, existing mechanisms for international cooperation across the Caribbean, the logistics of multi-jurisdiction investigations, leveraging international relationships to support anti-money-laundering regimes, and legal strategies for successful prosecution.
Wilks called the seminar a groundbreaking initiative.
“We have really redoubled our efforts across the Americas and the Caribbean to look at how we can take the profit out of crime, and the reality is that this is a really important undertaking for regional and national development.”
International cooperation
Kisha Sutherland, director of the RSS Asset Recovery Unit, warned that Caribbean nations must enhance their law-enforcement arsenal with mechanisms that permit the fusion of information and other technical capacities from other agencies in real time, given the well-connected criminal economy involving the sale and purchase of goods and services across multiple regional jurisdictions.
“The RSS endorses the JITs’ framework as a viable tool of international cooperation in the fight against crime,” she said.
The training is one of the interventions under the IDB/RSS Joint Investigations Framework Project, which seeks to establish a legal and operational guide for multilateral and bilateral cooperation among states to jointly conduct criminal investigations.