Dominican Republic Inmates Await Justice

Yamirka Delacruz’s husband, like almost 9,000 other inmates of this country’s overcrowded prisons, is in a limbo that not even a thorough overhaul of the justice system can end.

“He hasn’t been charged with anything. He hasn’t seen a judge. No one is telling him anything about when he might go to court,” Delacruz said of her 26-year-old husband, Luis Palmero, suspected in the death of a colleague in March 2004.

Palmero is being held despite a new criminal procedures code, advocated by President Leonel Fernandez, that took effect seven months ago. The code limits detention without charges to 48 hours, prohibits torture and mistreatment of inmates and considers a suspect innocent until proven guilty.

But overwhelmed courts and an internal police cleanup have prevented the code from being applied retroactively. In principle, inmates such as Palmero are still due their day in court. In practice, judges are too busy arraigning new suspects and the police force too diminished by firings for brutality, bribe-taking or illegal arrests to deal with the holdovers.

In reality, police still have the first and last word in what happens to thousands of suspects.

According to the National Commission on Human Rights, 66% of the 13,500 inmates in the Dominican Republic’s 35 prisons are reos preventivos -- preventively and indefinitely sentenced by police.

The wide-ranging criminal justice reform launched last year is intended to break what has long been a de facto monopoly by the National Police to detain, judge and sentence those they believe to be culprits.

The rights commission reports in an assessment released by the U.S. State Department in February that most preventivos never see a courtroom. Of the few who advance to arraignment, 90% are released for lack of evidence.

The group also paints a bleak picture of life inside the prisons. Criminal gangs control daily life in most institutions, bilking inmates for bribes to get food, the use of a bed or access to medical attention.

In La Victoria prison, the country’s largest, 3,500 inmates live in space designed for 1,000 and there is only one mattress for every 10 prisoners.

Since the criminal code took effect Sept. 27, the monthly totals of new prisoners being held without charges has dropped because police are now required to present evidence to keep those arrested in detention. But no progress has been made in addressing the backlog of cases of preventivos, which numbered 8,910 in mid-April.

National Police Chief Manuel de Jesus Perez Sanchez, appointed in August and charged with cleaning up the much-maligned force, says the reform effort will take years and leave a flawed process in place during the transition. But he points to some tangible improvements.

Police are being retrained, a corrections school has opened, as has a model prison -- the first new facility in decades. What will take the longest, Sanchez says, is reeducating the public to trust the police and work with them as security partners.

“The main thing we need to change is the practice of impunity,” said the chief, alluding to scandals such as the revelation last fall that police routinely kept recovered stolen cars for their own use or resale. “We want a society that doesn’t have the mentality that there has always been corruption, so it is somehow normal.”

Public education is also necessary to bring Dominicans around to the idea that defendants have rights that must be respected, he said, referring to public indifference to the plight of the preventivos.

The new criminal code requires that anyone held without charges for six months be set free, but authorities say that doesn’t happen for fear of igniting angry protests.

Manuel Jimenez, warden of a prison here that holds 650 men in space intended for 200, doesn’t dispute that conditions are harsh and the environment tense.

“All the prisons in the country have the same problem -- overcrowding.... It’s never been a priority, and the government is poor,” Jimenez said with a shrug.

Throughout the Caribbean, overcrowded and antiquated prisons, rising crime rates and migrating youth gangs have combined to provoke rioting among inmates.

The worst of the outbreaks, a March 7 riot and fire set by rival gangs at the Higuey prison 60 miles east of here, killed 138 inmates, most of them preventivos.

In Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, almost 500 inmates remain at large after a Feb. 19 breakout.

Even in Communist Cuba, at least two riots have been reported since March by the underground Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation.

Daniel Erikson, Caribbean analyst for the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, sees the region’s prison problems as the result of neglect and under-funding and the influx of ex-convicts deported from the United States.

“These are all small, poor, weak states under tremendous economic stress and highly vulnerable to natural disasters,” Erikson said. “Running prison systems costs a lot of money, and it tends to be one of the first things to get cut because this is not a very influential constituency.”

The justice overhaul began during President Fernandez’s first term from 1996 to 2000 and was reinvigorated with his return to office in August.

Since the anti-corruption drive in the police force began in earnest late last year, more than 500 officers have been fired for misconduct, and more are likely to be dismissed.

Interior Minister Franklin Almeida Rancier has pushed to replace about a quarter of the country’s 30,000-strong force but has been persuaded to do so incrementally as new cadets train to replace the officers leaving.

Neighborhood watch groups and crime-prevention seminars also have been organized in a bid to legitimize the image of police in the community and attract recruits committed to law enforcement instead of self-enrichment, said the chief, Perez Sanchez.

Dominicans say they have seen an improvement in security and living standards in recent months but attribute that to a gradual economic recovery from a bank failure two years ago that brought on withering inflation. Since Fernandez was elected last May, the peso has recovered from 51 to the U.S. dollar at the height of the banking disaster to about 27.

“There’s a lot of talk about cleaning up the police, but we don’t trust them,” said taxi driver Ramon Puerta, recalling corruption scandals during Fernandez’s first administration. “Here, nothing ever changes.”

Wives and mothers of inmates complain that corruption runs too deep. One woman, lined up to visit her son at the prison here, said families have to pay guards to be told of court dates if the case is heard, as well as for the inmate’s transportation to the courthouse.

“People are afraid to talk. We have to worry that they will mistreat our children,” the distraught mother, who did not want to be identified, said of the police running the prison.

“How can we have confidence in the promises of any government?”