Prison Break in Haiti Is Barely Noticed by Lax Police : Caribbean: Officers did nothing. Indifference points up tough U.S. task of training law agents in a lawless land.

There was a prison break from Haiti’s National Penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince on Sunday afternoon. The Haitian police did nothing to stop it and didn’t investigate it Monday. In fact, 24 hours later, they had no idea how many inmates had escaped after crawling through a hole dug in the prison’s concrete outer wall.

And by noon Monday, the police and prison guards had not even closed off the hole, which leads into the basketball court of the Methodist school next door. With classes back in session, the school’s security guard had to do it from his side.

Perhaps no one outside the school and prison would have known about the breakout had it not been for the U.S. Army military police and U.S.-financed international police monitors who discovered it. They caught eight inmates in the schoolyard and returned them to jail. But even they didn’t know how many had gotten away.

“We don’t know how many escaped because of the poor record-keeping in the prison,” said Paul Browne, the deputy director of the police-monitoring program. “We don’t even know how many prisoners are in there right now.”

The school guard, Constant Derival, said he believes at least 15 inmates escaped; local radio stations put the figure at more than 100.

The confusion occurred on the symbolic first day of the appearance of a gentler, more caring Haitian police--the day the first graduates from a U.S.-funded, five-day emergency retraining program took to the streets of the capital.

The police officers at the National Penitentiary were not among the graduates, the first 335 of Haiti’s military police to take a weeklong series of behavior modification and law-enforcement classes from FBI and other Justice Department trainers.

But even the first-day performance of the graduates was spotty, at best. The American MPs, who have been the only semblance of law in town, said they still could not get most of the officers to leave their barracks. “I haven’t really noticed much difference,” Lt. Erica Vodak said of the 98 new graduates at the station in the suburb of Petionville. “We’re still trying to push them out the door.”

Taken together, Monday’s police blotter in the capital provided a kaleidoscope of imagery highlighting the obstacles facing the U.S. military intervention force here, as well as the Clinton Administration’s $60-million, five-year program to help solve the most urgent problem facing Haiti today.

In a terrorized nation of victims now demanding justice after three years of brutal military rule, there still isn’t even a semblance of a judicial system, let alone a trained police department to enforce it.

More than two weeks after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return, the president has yet to appoint a Cabinet minister to deliver the justice he promised in his arrival speech. The last Haitian justice minister was assassinated by agents of the military regime more than a year ago, and he cannot be replaced until Aristide’s nominated prime minister, Smarck Michel, is confirmed by the Haitian Parliament, expected later this week.

U.S. officials and Haitian human-rights activists said the appointment of a justice minister and a core staff to begin the long process of building a functioning civil court and penal system is critical to the success of the police retraining program--and ultimately a more ambitious U.S.-funded plan to create a new police force in Haiti.

“Here you’ve got these new police graduates out on the streets now. But what happens to them next?” said one official close to the program. “What happens if they arrest somebody? What do they do with the suspect? They’re going to put him in one of these medieval jails where they don’t even write down prisoners’ names, let alone count them.”

The urgency for reform affects the image, and ultimate success, of the U.S. military intervention force. As the U.S. force tries to keep the Haitian police together to fill the law-and-order vacuum and keep the American troops from serving as the local police, it risks alienating the public it was sent to save.

Lt. Vodak illustrated the problem dramatically at the Petionville station Monday.

“It’s difficult for my patrols,” she said of the MPs who managed to persuade a handful of the Haitian police to join in joint patrols. “At one point, a Haitian man who spoke good English came up to one of my MPs and said, ‘How can you walk with this guy? He killed my brother.’

“We came here supposedly to help this country, and here we are walking with murderers.”

The U.S. program is designed to prevent that in the future. Retraining is only the first step.

Briefing reporters Monday on the initial phase of the program, coordinator Cary Hoover said that the only police officers permitted in the one-week “crash course” are those checked against lists of known human-rights violators and approved first by Aristide’s government and then by the U.S. Justice Department.

“These gentlemen have all been vetted,” he said of the graduates who ventured into the streets Monday and a second group of 378 who are taking the course at the Justice Department’s makeshift Port-au-Prince camp this week. “These are fairly decent human beings, if not very decent human beings who just want to do their job right.”

But Hoover conceded that the training “is, in fact, just a stopgap measure” for a police force that has never really been a police force. All Haitian police officers are soldiers, and none has ever received formal training in civilian police work.

“No, it’s not enough. Absolutely not. But at least it’s a start,” Hoover said.

Under the Justice Department program, a new police academy will be built and intensive four-month classes in professional law enforcement provided to the most professional police incumbents and new recruits, among them a group of police trainees drafted from among Haitian refugees at the U.S. Marine base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Those trainees are already at work in the northern city of Cap Haitien.

More on Haiti

* For the latest news and background on Haiti’s restoration of democracy, try the new TimesLink online service.

Details on Times electronic services, B4