Death Watch in Haiti’s Jails [dominionpaper.ca]

by CHRIS SCOTT

Haiti’s National Pen­i­ten­tiary PHOTO: DARREN ELL

Con­structed in 1918 by US Marines eager to con­sol­i­date their occu­pa­tion of Haiti, the National Pen­i­ten­tiary was designed to hold eight hun­dred pris­on­ers. With only minor expan­sions since then, the facil­ity now crams four thou­sand male inmates into an area of two thou­sand square meters.

At a den­sity of two detainees per square meter, con­di­tions in the jail are under­cut by four times the min­i­mum stan­dard estab­lished by the Inter­na­tional Red Cross, which calls for an allowance of two square meters per inmate.

Eye­wit­ness accounts paint the pic­ture of a packed envi­ron­ment inside the cell blocks, with pris­on­ers’ health fur­ther under­mined by poor light­ing and ven­ti­la­tion, a vitamin-deficient diet, and the preva­lence of com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases such as tuberculosis.

Since the over­throw of Haiti’s democ­racy in 2004, the country’s prison pop­u­la­tion has more than dou­bled, ris­ing from 3,500 shortly before the depar­ture of Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide to 8,000 today.

Hait­ian human rights lawyer Evel Fan­fan esti­mates that six thou­sand peo­ple were arrested in Port-au-Prince because of their polit­i­cal loy­al­ties in March 2004, the month fol­low­ing Aristide’s oust­ing. Although some were released soon after­ward, since that time both the Hait­ian police and the UN peace­keep­e­ing mis­sion MINUSTAH (United Nations Sta­bi­liza­tion Mis­sion in Haiti) have con­ducted aggres­sive oper­a­tions in poor sec­tors of the cap­i­tal, drag-netting youth at a faster rate than the Hait­ian judi­cial sys­tem can process.

Brian Con­can­non, a lawyer who directs an Oregon-based Haiti sol­i­dar­ity orga­ni­za­tion, describes a typ­i­cal Hait­ian inmate:

“They are almost all poor,” responds Con­can­non. “Over 80 per cent have not been con­victed of any­thing. Many don’t have a lawyer; most have been tortured.”

Concannon’s group, the Insti­tute for Jus­tice and Democ­racy in Haiti, works in asso­ci­a­tion with the Port-au-Prince based Bureau of Inter­na­tional Lawyers (BAI), an advo­cacy group which was financed by Haiti’s elected gov­ern­ment until its fund­ing was cut fol­low­ing the 2004 coup.

Vis­it­ing the BAI office, I met my first case study of the post-coup Haiti incar­cer­a­tion pat­tern: Michaelle LaFrance, a for­mer TV jour­nal­ist who says she was arrested for wear­ing dread­locks. Seated in the shaded court­yard of the build­ing, LaFrance does her best to con­vey to me the atmos­phere of class ten­sion that gripped Port-au-Prince dur­ing the weeks before Pres­i­dent Aristide’s overthrow.

Because Aris­tide invested in social spend­ing, and applied pro­tec­tion­ist mea­sures to sus­tain Haiti’s econ­omy, he remained pop­u­lar with the poor. He also drew the ire of neoliberal-minded donor nations, includ­ing the US and Canada, which moved to under­mine him by chan­nel­ing money to mid­dle class-based oppo­si­tion groups. In a repeat of scenes seen in Venezuela and else­where, afflu­ent Haitians flooded the streets of the cap­i­tal, call­ing the elected gov­ern­ment ille­git­i­mate, and demand­ing Aristide’s res­ig­na­tion. Dur­ing this period, tele­jour­nal­ist LaFrance was phys­i­cally assaulted while cov­er­ing an oppo­si­tion demonstration.

Fol­low­ing Aristide’s depar­ture on Feb­ru­ary 29, a posse of for­mer Hait­ian sol­diers aligned with the middle-class oppo­si­tion occu­pied the city. The names of wanted per­sons were read on the radio, and any­one or any­thing asso­ci­ated with grass­roots activism imme­di­ately became suspect.

Shortly after Feb­ru­ary 29, recalls LaFrance, who was 24 at the time, “The police came to my house. They took everything.”

Many of the men and women clog­ging Haiti’s jail sys­tem are in fact minor casu­al­ties in the cam­paign of class repres­sion. Arrested dur­ing an anti-gang sweep, fin­gered by a neigh­bour, or picked up for talk­ing too loudly or angrily, they are ware­housed for months to years while await­ing trial on vague or difficult-to-prove charges such as “asso­ci­at­ing with mis­cre­ants.” In the case of known polit­i­cal orga­niz­ers, how­ever, the charges can be more specific.

Ronald Dauphin, now 43 and Haiti’s longest-serving pris­oner, was arrested by para­mil­i­taries on March 1, 2004, the day after Pres­i­dent Aris­tide was forced from office. A mem­ber of Aristide’s party and a port offi­cial from the city of Saint Marc, Dauphin was accused of par­tic­i­pat­ing in a mas­sacre which report­edly occurred when anti-government para­mil­i­taries clashed with police out­side Saint Marc on Feb­ru­ary 11. Through more than five years of incar­cer­a­tion, Dauphin has main­tained his inno­cence. The case has never gone to trial.

Dauphin’s 27 co-accused in the case include for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Yvon Nep­tune, pro-Aristide activists, and at least one cab­i­net mem­ber. In a pre-trial indict­ment handed down in 2005, many details of the Saint Marc inci­dent remain fuzzy. The doc­u­ment cites fifty killed, but iden­ti­fies only eight casu­al­ties from the Feb­ru­ary 11 events, and fur­nishes no evi­dence about the where­abouts of miss­ing bod­ies. Named wit­nesses claim that Dauphin was present dur­ing the clash, but do not specif­i­cally link him to either of the offenses for which he is accused: mur­der and arson. Writ­ing in French, inves­ti­gat­ing Judge Cluny-Jules instead argues that Dauphin has been denounced by “la clameur publique,” broadly trans­lat­able as by rumour.

While most observers do not dis­pute that some sort of armed con­flict arose between mem­bers of pro– and anti-government forces on Feb­ru­ary 11, it has yet to be demon­strated that gov­ern­ment agents over­stepped the bounds of a legit­i­mate police action, or tar­geted non-combatants.

In the inter­ven­ing two years Dauphin’s well-being has declined dramatically.

Trav­el­ing to Haiti in April 2009 as part of a union del­e­ga­tion, Cal­i­for­nia teacher Seth Don­nely heard dis­turb­ing reports that Dauphin suf­fered from an acute, untreated ill­ness. Accom­pa­nied by other del­e­gates, Don­nely arrived at the National Pen­i­ten­tiary on April 16 for a sched­uled visit.

Upon arrival, he says, “Dauphin was in fact very ill. He had to be car­ried out in the court­yard by other prisoners…During our visit, he col­lapsed. [He] was uncon­scious with his eyes wide open. He was not respond­ing to pres­sure that was being applied by the health care pro­fes­sion­als [there were two nurses on the del­e­ga­tion] to his sternum.”

In spite of com­plaints about headaches and abdom­i­nal pain, Dauphin had not been autho­rized to leave the jail for med­ical treat­ment. The nurses con­cluded that Dauphin “may have a sep­tic infec­tion that was spread­ing through his upper body.”

Many of Haiti’s grass­roots activists believe that extend­ing pre-trial deten­tion is a gov­ern­ment tac­tic to neu­tral­ize or even kill unwel­come polit­i­cal actors with­out the worry of hav­ing to build a legal case against them.

Accord­ing to doc­u­ments released to researcher Anthony Fen­ton under an access to infor­ma­tion request, in March 2004 a Hait­ian NGO known as the National Coali­tion for Hait­ian Rights (NCHR) asked for and received $100,000 from Canada’s devel­op­ment agency to pros­e­cute the authors of the alleged mas­sacre of La Sci­erie. NCHR’s mem­ber­ship had pre­vi­ously stated a posi­tion which iden­ti­fied it closely with the anti-Aristide camp. In its fund­ing request the NCHR promised to dis­burse money through a “vic­tims” fund to cit­i­zens who had suf­fered from polit­i­cal vio­lence in Saint Marc.

The inci­dents that were eli­gi­ble for com­pen­sa­tion were lim­ited to those which had occurred from Feb­ru­ary 9 to 29, exclud­ing vic­tims of the wave of vio­lence against Aris­tide sup­port­ers that crested after the fall of the gov­ern­ment on Feb­ru­ary 29.

Using Canada’s money, the NCHR thus con­ducted a pub­lic­ity and legal cam­paign to push for the incar­cer­a­tion of pro-Aristide actors. But nei­ther the NCHR nor the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment has sub­se­quently pushed for a trial, sug­gest­ing that open-ended deten­tion, rather than due legal process, may be what they’re after.

Scratch the sur­face of the debate on how to improve jail con­di­tions in Haiti, and two dif­fer­ent tac­tics emerge: increase the amount of floor space by expand­ing or con­struct­ing jails, or reduce the num­ber of pris­on­ers by releas­ing those held on vague sus­pi­cions or for petty crimes.

Accord­ing to many Haitians, the prob­lem of secu­rity has been sen­sa­tion­al­ized to jus­tify class-based repres­sion. Most of those impris­oned are extremely poor and have been the vic­tims of social and polit­i­cal pro­fil­ing. Many pris­on­ers are being held for petty crimes for which they would not have been tar­geted if it was not for their low social status.

Patrick Elie, a Port-au-Prince-based activist and for­mer cab­i­net mem­ber, sees the path to eco­nomic devel­op­ment in Haitian-based agri­cul­ture, rather than investor-based man­u­fac­tur­ing. Accord­ing to Elie, most of Haiti’s cur­rent crime is poverty-related, and for this rea­son invest­ing in incar­cer­a­tion as a deter­rent is a futile exer­cise. Jail con­struc­tion and secu­rity mea­sures are expen­sive, gob­bling up scarce resources that could oth­er­wise be invested in schools or agri­cul­ture, which would help reduce poverty in the long term.

“When you have 70 per cent unem­ploy­ment, and you build more jails, you’ll be build­ing jails ’til King­dom come,” he says.

With Haiti still occu­pied by UN sol­diers, the made-in-Canada ide­ol­ogy seems dom­i­nant for the time being. Under inter­na­tional pres­sure, the gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Rene Preval, who suc­ceeded Aris­tide, has promised to dou­ble the num­ber of Hait­ian police offi­cers, from 7,000 to 14,000 by 2011. Sim­i­larly, a quick glance at CIDA’s web­site shows that a high num­ber of big ticket projects funded in Haiti are directed toward “gov­er­nance mea­sures,” includ­ing a com­mit­ment to build a new police acad­emy at the cost of $18.1 mil­lion by 2014.

Chris Scott is a mem­ber of the Mon­treal chap­ter of the Canada Haiti Action Network.