In Don Dada: Assessing the Socio-economic and Political Power of Jamaica’s Mafia Bosses, The UWI Press takes on a controversial subject: the Jamaican don.

The Jamaican don is a non-state actor, a male figure who wields considerable power and control inside his garrison community, where he plays a leadership role. Garrisons in Jamaica are poor inner-city communities characterized by homogeneous voting patterns for one of Jamaica’s two major political parties: the People’s National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party.



With revelatory insight, Don Dada explores the major roles dons play in their communities and how the activities of these non-state criminal actors have influenced the governance process. Focusing on communities in the downtown metropolitan area of Kingston, the capital city, the book investigates the evolution of the don from the 1960s to the present and their roles of security/protection, social welfare, partisan mobilization, and law and order. Blake contends that dons have emerged as embedded governing authorities in Jamaican garrisons based on the socio-economic and political roles they carry out, and he puts forward a peace-building model to dissolve the power of dons and their gangs in Jamaica’s marginal communities.