For decades before the Jan­u­ary earth­quake dev­as­tated Haiti’s cap­i­tal, the coun­try was one of the poor­est and most rav­aged. Sto­ries of ignored injus­tice are every­where. Adding to their mis­ery is the insult of anonymity and the irony of being just one among too many, with lit­tle chance of being heard.

But Haiti’s injus­tice is systematic.

For the first week after the earth­quake, one had the impres­sion that tragedy hit all equally, across priv­i­lege and class lines. The illu­sion did not last long, and six months later, the most dis­en­fran­chised con­tinue to suf­fer as much as they did before. How is it pos­si­ble — with over 900 NGOs cur­rently in coun­try, many boast­ing the pro­tec­tion of the most vul­ner­a­ble as their main goal — that an 11-year-old girl is locked up in a per­ilous, over­crowded jail, with no prospect of get­ting out?

Like much of the country’s infra­struc­ture, Haiti’s pen­i­ten­tiary sys­tem suf­fered huge losses in the earth­quake. Some 4,000 inmates escaped when the country’s largest prison col­lapsed. While hun­dreds were rear­rested or killed in the fol­low­ing weeks, many more remain on the loose.

Some of the escapees are very dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals, no doubt. Haiti has a long his­tory of kid­nap­pings, mur­ders, and bru­tal­ity as well as a his­tory of gang vio­lence financed by the wealthy and pow­er­ful. But many of these crim­i­nals – chefs as they are called here – are lit­tle more than teenagers. Brought up in slums like Cité Soleil, their rep­u­ta­tion seems to pre­cede any chance at redemption.

“Haitians are good peo­ple,” a vol­un­teer with a small NGO recently told me. “Except for the gang­sters down­town.” Many of the pris­on­ers in Haiti’s jails are indeed guilty of hor­ri­ble crimes. Many more are vic­tims of cir­cum­stance. Far too many are sim­ply innocent.

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.

• The author inter­view­ing young inmates at the Pétionville Civil Prison in Port-au-Prince. Pho­to­graph ©Thony Belizaire. •

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.

Pétionville prison shook with the Jan­u­ary earth­quake but did not col­lapse. The Min­istry of Pub­lic Affairs inspected the build­ing and rec­om­mended repairs. In July inmates con­tinue to live in the same over­crowded cells they occu­pied before, some with cracks in the walls.

“They told us we’re good for now but even­tu­ally we will need to fix this,” Math­ieu said. “I have 306 women here, in a build­ing that legally shouldn’t have more than 36. Where am I sup­posed to put them?”

• Thir­teen and four­teen year old boys in prison with forty-year-old hard­ened men. Haiti. June 16, 2009. Pho­to­graph by Flickr user A. Thomp­son Pho­tog­ra­phy. •

Behind her, a sign sprayed on the wall in child­ish hand­writ­ing reads “mezanmi tim­oun yo mande libete,” – my friends, the chil­dren ask for free­dom. “How are they going to make up for the time they lost?” asked Math­ieu, a mother her­self. “Every time I look at a child here I see my own daughter.”

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.

Haiti has received more atten­tion in the last six months than it did in the past three decades. It took an earth­quake for most to learn of its plight and few com­pre­hend the depth of the country’s prob­lems. The earth­quake has only revealed the sur­face of man-made poverty and injus­tices that have accu­mu­lated for years. “The sit­u­a­tion was always pre­car­i­ous, but Jan­u­ary 12th com­pli­cated things tremen­dously,” says Aris­ti­das. “We’re try­ing to change this, but it will take time.”

Every­thing takes time here. For six months, peo­ple have been liv­ing in tents at best, under shel­ters made with plas­tic in most cases. Build­ing new homes might take years. Bil­lions of dol­lars have been promised to Haiti. Lit­tle of it has actu­ally arrived. Even less has been put towards tan­gi­ble differences.

At Pétionville’s prison — like in the camps for the dis­placed that sprawl the city’s hills — what strikes the most is the sense of res­ig­na­tion that seems to have set­tled in with the rainy sea­son. Many call it resilience, invok­ing this myth­i­cal notion of Hait­ian resilience as an excuse to accept con­di­tions none of us would. But accep­tance is not resilience. Res­ig­na­tion is not resilience. Hope­less­ness is not resilience.

At the National Pen­i­ten­tiary and the Pétionville Civil Prison, teenagers and chil­dren like Car­men Suze con­tinue to wait.

“I don’t like it here,” the girl says, look­ing to the ground. “I miss my par­ents.”
About the Author:
Alice Speri is a reporter and writer based in New York City. Alice recently moved to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is work­ing as a cor­re­spon­dent for The Hait­ian Times and string­ing for AFP. Alice grew up in Italy and lived in New Mex­ico, India, Benin, Egypt and Pales­tine. In New York, Alice cov­ered South­east Queens and the South Bronx, while work­ing for Al Jazeera Eng­lish at the UN and com­plet­ing her mas­ters at Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism School. As an under­grad, she stud­ied com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture and gov­ern­ment at Har­vard University.

http://thewip.net/contributors/2010/07/haitis_incarcerated_minors_my.html