Again, the almighty USA is the last country to talk to anyone about exploitation of immigrants. If you read international news that sentence will suffice.

I do agree with the US government on our prison system. We need a bigger prison, better healthcare for prisoners, and better commitment and execution to their rehabilitation.

Recidivism rates are high and we are ill-preparing prisoners to reenter society with the expectation that they have learned their lesson. Most of the prisoners cannot read and write and any man with violent tendencies and poor education and bound to reoffend.

An inmate once told me that he slept on the concrete floor in maximum security amongst 5 other prisoners including himself in a cell built for 3 people. He was later moved to minimum security where only a spring mattress was available. Upon living Her Majesty's prison he slept on the floor for months as he could not get adjusted to the soft bed.

For those of you who believe that they should be punished and should bear those consequences, we must be reminded that these individuals become extra hardened in a survival of the fittest mentality. I refer you to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

All due respect to the almighty USA, but they are a far cry to the extremely high rates of sexual abuse of children, continued police brutality, increasing immigration problems, increasing lengthy pretrial detention, continued witness intimidation, HIV discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, etc, etc, etc. in their own country.

The Bahamas is working on its problems, and while we appreciate the pressure from our #1 money maker, the tourism industry, the USA should be careful in its criticism of areas that in its own population are magnified not only due to the larger number of people, but also magnified in that they have the resources, but have still not solved their problems.

Criticisms as such affect our tourist market. This is cause for concern for Bahamians. We are not a perfect nation, but in comparison to many, many, many, countries in the Caribbean we are on the upward mark.

Pointing fingers and naming areas that delineate a country's lifestyle, or paint pictures of the day to day that exaggerate can be lethal on an international level.

This report while it motivates the Bahamas to continue working to solve our problems, can be very damning. I hope Minister Mitchell, has an appropriate diplomatic response.

Mr. Miller, Kudos! Could we also look into solar power as the main driver of our energy also please? That would further decrease the energy bills and decrease the poweroverload that leads to many outages. Since we are willing to spend millions, let's look at solar, we have sun a large percentage of the 365 days of the year. Let's look into ways of taking advantage of our geographical location in the tropics and do our part to be green in the ever increasing rate of global warming.

Ummm, yeah. Some of you either need to read the comment again, or read the one that breaks it down for you below, because you have interpreted my criticism incorrectly.

Ummm to all of you clearly talking about me. I never said that the workers didn't work when they WERE employed. I guess some of you missed reading comprehension. To put it plainly for those that need literal interpretation: The government has not employed them because there has been no monies in order to pay them to do work! Therefore, I see no sense in giving money to buy instruments for a program when there is no money to pay the worker that does show up to do his job! As far as my reference to the Urban Renewal program being dead, it is dead, it has not been in practice in who knows how long.

Its nice that Mr. and Mrs. Wells want to give money and yes I am criticizing the use of the funds because it is ridiculous to purchase instruments when there are still abandoned buildings, abandoned cars lining the streets, and not enough public health/social programs to uplift communities.

You are all welcome to disagree, but I stand by my original comment and the sentiment/reason for it as outlined by this comment.

Thanks for that information. I hope those Bahamian Sea Lion trainers apply for the job then.

We continue to wonder why they is a mismanagement of funds. $20,000..."the majority of which will be used to buy musical instruments for the Urban Renewal Band?!!!" What kind of foolishness is this? They had to shut down Urban Renewal because they didn't have the funds to pay workers/equipment to do the work, but they now have money to make sure the workers can whistle while they DON'T work?!

Mr. Wells, I can assure you someone like myself will not donate monies to be used as such. Is this what you allocated your money to, a band? They must want to make funeral music for the dead Urban Renewal program.

I think it is ridiculous on all levels, be you white, red, yellow, or purple. It is horrible that this issue just making headline news, I agree with that. Mitchell and his foreign affairs crew need to stop their foolishness and this Bahamian only mentality. No country has a workforce that is 100% comprised of its citizenry...NONE!

Denying work permits for cleaning houses and cooking is one things, but to expect a business to train the workforce is our job as a country. I think you should thank Atlantis for graciously doing that, but by no means is that a requirement. For a tourism destination and currently as leaders in the region in tourism, we should be training our workforce for all aspects of that as well as being able to market our school for foreigners to come here and spend the money here to learn tourism from us.

Our culinary school does an amazing job and the chefs that finish from there do extremely well, many of them winning international awards, but we don't hear much about that.

Whatever happened to the Hotel Training College? Oh yes, that's right COB wanted rights over them.....let the Hotel Training College be an independent entity, they would be much more successful if they were.