I just found an excellent and heartwrenching article about Haiti’s incarcerated minors, and more broadly the life-threatening prison conditions in Haitian prisons as well as the lack of legal infrastructure. As in so many other developing countries, innocent individuals are often wrongfully convicted and thrown in jail, only to languish in the face of inadequate legal aid and disease-ridden prison conditions. Here are a few notable quotes from the article:
Suze was arrested in May near the central plateau town of Mirebalais in the Haitian countryside. She was taken to the Pétionville Civil Prison in the capital, the country’s only penitentiary for women. She shares a 40 square foot cell with two thin mattresses and a hammock with a group of 15 girls, ages 11 to 17. The cell’s maximum capacity is four people according to Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), which has denounced the prison’s conditions.
According to Marie-Yolaine Mathieu, the prison’s motherly but strict warden, “Nobody explained to Suze what was happening or how long she will be here.” Adding that it will likely take months for the girl to appear before a judge, Mathieu said she doesn’t know the details of the incident. She is overwhelmed by her job, tired, and skeptical of the justice system.
Like most inmates in Haitian jails, Suze’s detention is “preventive” and based on little evidence, Mathieu explains. Human Rights Watch reported in 2009 that more than 76 percent of Haitian inmates are pretrial detainees, a number bound to increase following the judiciary chaos caused by the earthquake.
“They just send people to prison and forget them here,” says Mathieu. Many inmates have spent years waiting to be tried for crimes for which the maximum sentence would be a few months. “The girls keep asking me, when will we be tried? How long will we be here?”
In an interview, Haiti’s chief prosecutor Auguste Aristidas, said the conditions of minors in jails are “intolerable.” He has been pushing the Ministry of Justice to intervene. He is also fighting illegal arrests and extended pretrial detentions. He added that he is reviewing each prisoner’s case, pointing to that of a 14-year-old boy who was recently rearrested after escaping in January. The boy had been held for months for stealing a gallon of cheap rum.
Aristidas said adequate resources to deal with juveniles are lacking at both the judicial and the penitentiary level. “Minors should not be tried by common tribunals but by tribunals for children.” When children are arrested, Aristidas added, basic rights such as food and sanitation should be assured. “We must create an environment where reeducation can really be effective,” he said.
Another good passage:
The situation is worse at the National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince, where 43 boys ages 13 to 17 share a “dirty, wet, and foul smelling cell,” according to the RNDDH. These young inmates are part of the 214 minors who escaped the Delmas Civil Prison for juveniles, destroyed by the earthquake. The National Penitentiary was also damaged and 1,211 prisoners – many of them rearrested after they escaped in January – now share six cells.
Marie Yolene Gilles, an advocate with the RNDDH, regularly lobbies with prison authorities to improve living conditions for underage inmates. Gilles criticizes the government for failing to protect incarcerated minors.
A hundred mattresses, still wrapped in plastic, line the walls of the office of the National Penitentiary director. A gift from Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean, the mattresses have been sitting there for days. They are waiting for authorization from the director to bring some of the mattresses to the boys’ cells.
“Even if they do they won’t be able to fit them in those cells,” said Gilles, adding that inmates take turns sleeping because there is not enough room for all of them to lie down at the same time.
“There is no real will to change the situation,” Gilles later says, standing in the National Penitentiary’s steamy kitchen, checking with the cooks for the daily menu. Inmates are served two meals a day but have to rely on their families for drinking water or more varied nutrition. “Until I went on public radio to talk about it, all they got was rice, every day,” Gilles says.
A 2009 news article from Human Rights Watch reports that Haiti’s prison system is extremely overcrowded, with 8204 inmates held in a facility with a maximum capacity of 2448! Moreover, in two cities - Gonaïves and Petit Goâve - there are no prison or jail facilities, and as a result the police stations have been informally converted into detention centers. 274 individuals are detained at the Gonaïves, while the maximum capacity of the station is only 75. Prison conditions are harsh and unsanitary. There is insufficient room for all prisoners to sleep and stand at the same time. Prisoners are malnourished and must rely on food and water from family to survive. The spread of diseases like malaria and tuberculosis is common, but prisoners have little access to medical care. Torture is also widespread: the Institute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti reports that 40% of prisoners in three detention centers reported that they were tortured or abused (beaten with pistols, bottles, or sticks) by officers and government officials.
As you can see, the situation is heartbreaking, especially when it comes to juveniles who have committed minor crimes like petty theft and are essentially being punished with a death sentence - to die of disease and malnutrition in an overcrowded jail. Young people don’t deserve such harsh punishment - they need to be rehabilitated into society. For many young offenders, there is hope for reform … that is, until, they enter the prison system and become hardened, tortured, lifetime offenders with no other options; with no education, literacy or job training, what hope do they have to become productive members of society? Prison conditions like this are ineffective at best and life-threatening at worst. I’m very glad that this issue has been brought to light; more people need to be talking about unjust prison conditions in developing countries. Despite the gravity of the problem, there is little international attention to this issue. Articles like this in mainstream media are certainly the first step. I’d highly encourage you to read the entire article here. You can also read more about Haiti’s criminal justice system at Human Rights Watch.
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