Justice System in the Dominican Republic

Introduction

Reports and articles about the Dominican penal system are characterized by a radical misunderstanding of what is really going on.  For example, Amnesty International (2004) U.S. Department of State (2005), and the OAS (1999) all report that at any given time, 70% to 90% of Dominican prisoners are in remanded  status, meaning they have not yet been to trial [1];  the average wait for trial as a long six months, with some individuals incarcerated for as long as five years without ever going to court; “As a rule,” the U.S. Department of State (2005) reports, “few defendants are granted bail”; and, “Penalties for possession, use, or trafficking in illegal drugs in the Dominican Republic are severe, and convicted offenders can expect long jail sentences and heavy fines.”

The inescapable conclusion is that the Dominican penitentiary and justice systems are highly inefficient, incarcerated individuals spend long periods in prison, justice is delayed but, when finally meted out, severe. Very little of all this is true. Indeed, the prevailing system is almost the complete opposite. People imprisoned in the Dominican Republic usually spend very little time behind bars. The vast majority get out on bail, they do not want to go to trial, and even when they do get tried and sentenced there is still the very real prospect of buying a pardon or simply paying ones way out of the system. As a prisoner once half-jokingly said to me, “the Dominican Republic is the only country in the world where you can make bail after you’ve been convicted.”

And it could be no other way.

The Dominican Republic’s 35 prisons are built to house 8,561 inmates; they typically house 12,000 to 17,000 (International Center for Prison Studies 2004). This may sound like overcrowding, but when examined in light of crime statistics, what it reflects is not the many people locked away but the great majority of  Dominican criminals apprehended either do not serve time or serve a very short time in prison. There simply is not enough space inside the penitentiaries to house more than a small fraction of those arrested. A closer look at arrest statistics reveals the extremity of this point.

With ten homicides per day in 2005, eliminating the 30% in which the killer is a cop, if the Dominican authorities caught and convicted only half of the remaining killers and then gave them the required 10 to 30-year sentences, the penitentiaries would be full in eight years (Brea and Cabral 1999; Hoy 4 July 2005). That’s just the killers. This does not count the thousands of annual assaults in which people are maimed, raped, or robbed. Using the available statistics, between 1993 and 1997 the Dominican police arrested 391,661 people for acts of violence (Cabral and Cabral 2006); in 2002 alone, there were 3,300 reported rapes (US Department of State 2005; Cabral 2004); in 2004, in the capital city of Santo Domingo (~25% of the population) there were 27,000 accusations of child abuse (Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor February 25, 2004). And we still have not calculated those caught in trafficking, larceny, extortion, selling stolen property, cattle rustling, human trafficking, conspiracy,  fraud, and embezzlement, most of whom slip easily through the system, if they ever go to jail at all.

Take illegal boat voyages as an example. Hoy Newspaper reported that from 2001 to 2004, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Dominican Navy detained 1,738 illegal boat voyages; 926 captains and organizers were “arrested.” The codified sentences, had they been convicted, vary from fines to as much as 30 years imprisonment, depending on their role. But of the 926 suspects caught, only seven were tried, one was convicted–really, “one.” Another example is illegal drag racing in the streets of Santo Domingo, a sport wealthy young people began enjoying in the early 1990s. On Friday and Saturday nights, two of the city’s main arteries are choked with young people drinking and socializing. In their midst, the drag racers have hit and killed 78 pedestrians and 26 drivers (only 12 of whom were participants); 506 people were sent to justice; 172 of them more than once; none were ever convicted–yes, that’s correct, “none” (El Caribe newspaper 2004).

Also missing from the already overcrowded penitentiary cell blocks are many of the deportees from U.S. prisons.  Between 1997 and 2005 there were 30,000 of them.  In an agreement between the U.S. and Dominican authorities, Dominican nationals imprisoned in the United States are granted early release and deported to the Republic under the condition that they serve out the other half of their time in a DR penitentiary. But most don’t. If they did, than, in 2005 alone, the 5,206 Dominicans deported from the US that year would have filled 61 percent of the 8,561 spaces in the Dominican penitentiary.

Every year some 91,000 men pass inside of the walls of the Dominican penitentiaries.  The authorities and district attorneys make, as explained, no investigations. And if someone gets out of the country they make no effort to get them back. That would cost time and money.  They have only extradited three people from other countries in the past ten years. Three.

Much crime, very little prison space, and rapid turnover rates are indicators of a system completely out of synchrony with the codified laws. On September 27th, 2005, in the capital city–where lives about 25 percent of the population (2,400,000) — there were 300,000 pending criminal cases (U.S. Department of State 2006). Where were the defendants? With, at that point in time, 12,902 prisoners crammed in the penitentiary space meant for 8,561 inmates we can comfortably conclude that very few were in prison.

Did or will they ever get tried?  Highly unlikely.

The rate of new cases added daily to the Dominican court dockets far outstrips that of review. Take the Dominican Supreme Court, for example. In 1996, the court had more than 15,000 pending cases; they resolved eight to ten cases per month (OAS 1999: Chapt 3).

If you are still not convinced that the formal codified Dominican legal system is ill-equipped to deal with crime and enforcing civil obedience–and, in fact, does not deal with most of it– take a look at the changes in crime rates. While crime has skyrocketed– as evidenced by a 355 percent percent increase in homicides over the 13 years 1992 to 2005–the population of the Dominican prisons relative to the population of the country remained unchanged. Indeed, if we figure in the crime rate, then in the three years 2002 to 2005, the ratios of prisoners to crimes committed declined by 25 percent.  Put another way, the general population increased 18 percent over that of year 1992, while the prison population increased 19 percent, or, as a percentage of the population, remained the same; yet crime, as indicated by homicide increased 355 percent.

Increasing the size of the police force has not changed conviction rates either. In the years 2001 to 2006, the size of the Dominican National police force went from 15,000 to 32,000. Yet the number of people incarcerated declined by ten percent (see Daily News – 11 April 2002 ;  and World Prison Population List  Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate King’s College 2005).

What’s going on?

Where are all the criminals going? Who actually gets locked up? And how do the authorities decide who gets released? As will be seen below, most prisoners are processed, not according to the official penal code, but according to an unofficial and informal system. I’ll begin with the Police.  (Note that I discuss the system briefly vis a vis Haiti, a country where I have spent 15 years working and doing researching for NGOs, however, this was an approach I was exploring but never completed, hence most of the rest of the article deals exclusively with the DR).

Justice in the DR

Police

Although in the Dominican Republic, unlike Haiti, the police and military monopolize justice, there is occasional vigilante justice similar to Haiti. Accounts of criminals lynched in barrios and small towns occasionally make the newspapers as do occasional violent xenophobic outbursts against Haitians—usually in the form of an out of proportion and poorly targeted retaliation to a crime by a particular Haitian. Violence upon arrest and financial redemption have supplanted the formal codified system. The difference in the Dominican Republic however is one of degree. The police are in far greater control than in Haiti and often mediate the vigilantism. They allow and even encourage victims to beat handcuffed detainees, an experience common enough that one might witness such events in the course of everyday life (as I have: a man sits handcuffed in the back of a police car while his victim, an elderly business man, punches him repeatedly in the head through the open window; police stand idly by and wait for him to finish. Noon, a sunny business day in a chic area of downtown Santo Domingo, at an intersection in front of a new Taco Bell a man lies dead in the street, a small rivulet of blood running from the bullet hole in his head; the policemen who killed him stands calmly by chatting; a crowd of upper middle class denizens milling about discussing the merits of killing thieves and stopping crime. Weeks later, not far away, a wealthy residential condominium, a thief is apprehended; a group of neighbors find a nearby policeman and ask him to come and arrest the man;  but the policeman is busy with another case, a broken down vehicle, and cannot attend to the thief; he recommends that the citizens kill the thief.)

The notion of immediate justice does not stop with thieves and murderers. As in Haiti even drivers who are responsible for traffic accidents may be targeted for vigilante punishment. The difference is that the punishment is often mediated by police. In one recent case, 7:00 a.m., a public bus packed with passengers from low income barrios headed to work in the upper class residential neighborhoods of Santo Domingo is hit by a semi-truck. The truck driver attempts to flee, a policeman apprehends him, handcuffs the driver and makes him stand as passengers from the bus–housekeepers and laborers–line up, single file, and take turns striking the man in the face and insulting him:  “Abuser”, “All we’re trying to do is get to work,” “You could have killed us.”

All of what I am saying to this point comes with a caveat: Justice, so to speak, is for the poor. The police as in Haiti actually act to protect thieves with money. In the Dominican Republic the middle and upper class are often above justice, unless they have victimized someone more powerful than themselves.

In the Dominican Republic a similar informal system and attitude toward criminality exists. The difference is that with a strong police and military, the authorities continue to monopolize justice, no matter how brutal and far from the letters of the legal code.

As in Haiti, there are certain rules that the police operate on:  Robbers of large businesses, grocery stores or exchange houses are, if apprehended, killed on the spot, whether they surrender or not. In the case of the Dominican Republic, however, it is usually the police and military that do the killing. Dominican newspapers abound with the accounts and are quite frank in their details. Extrajudicial executions are so common and such a prominent part of the Dominican Justice system that the point will be returned to below. In Haiti, it’s more often pep la, common people, who do the killing.

Also similar to Haiti, Dominican police officers begin beating thieves and violent criminals upon arrest, whether the suspect resists or not. Slapping on the ears is common as is the stick under the knees immobilization technique used in Haiti. Prisoners in the Forteleza recounted the common use of affixation. The accounts usually went as follows:  a prisoner is made to stand on a ammunition box, hands cuffed behind the back and then tied to bars in the windows and the box is kicked out from underneath the suspects feet so that he is hanging, arms being ripped back and upwards in their sockets. A plastic bag with pureed onions or detergent is placed over the subjects head. As the man gasps for air he is jabbed in the stomach with a stick on the end of which is an aluminum cup that blunts the blows, avoiding breaking the skin or  bruising. Another commonly reported technique is that the interrogators tie a five gallon bucket of water to the prisoners scrotum and continually move the bucket farther and farther away, pulling and stretching the man’s testicles.

Extrajudicial Executions

The police in the Dominican Republic have met increasing violent crime with increasing violence of their own. In 1997, human rights organizations reported 50 extra-judicial executions carried out by the National Police; in year 2000 there were 250;  in year 2003 there were between 250 and 350; in 2004 as many as 360 and in 2004 there were an estimates 250 to 360 extrajudicial executions (Amnesty International 2001;  U.S. Department of State 2004). These are only cases of outright execution in the presence of witnesses. As the police sometimes make attempts to cover up executions, many of the 500 unsolved murders may also be the work of the police.

At least a large part of the police violence is organized and deliberate. Well known to many of the men in the Forteleza is a Puerto Plato torturer and police assassin named Cabrito (who was subsequently assassinated; he was set up, as he pulled into a gas station three men with rifles pumped bullets into him). Another famous assassin in the Puerto Plata area is Cobra who over the past three decades has reportedly killed dozens of alleged thieves, vandals, and murderers. In a Santo Domingo barrio of Los Alcarrizos where I lived intermittently for 17 months there was a Lieutenant known among the poor people in the barrios for having publically executed over fifty delinquents. Indeed, when one talks to people on the street about police killing the impression is that a great deal more extrajudicial executions are being carried out than recorded by human rights organizations.

But not all is as orderly as it seems. Many of the killings occur as the byproduct of the violence and corruption. One young man who was sleeping in the hall the first two weeks I was here had been shot by the police twice. What happened, according to him, was that he was caught robbing an office. It was night, he had taken a sack of five peso coins out of the office. There was some kind of silent alarm linked to the owners cell phone, the police arrived, caught him, knocked him around, handcuffed him and put him in the back of a pickup truck where he sat on a bench across from one of the policemen. The policeman put the bag of coins beneath the bench. Before they could pull away the owner of the office, who had been the one who summoned the police in first place (he had an alarm connected to a telephone), arrived. He asked where the coins where. The young man heard him asking and shouted, “right here, under the bench.” The cop sitting across from him called him a smart ass, pulled his pistol and shot him in the thigh. Another cop came running over, asked what happened. The first cop told him. The second cop then pulled his pistol and shot the young man in the leg a second time. They subsequently dumped him on the ground in front of the hospital. The following week, they learned he had survived, went back to the hospital and brought him to prison.

Roundups

Another high profile police tactic used in the Dominican Republic is the barrio raid, a program that has long history in the DR but currently, under the title of U.S. promoted Democratic Security Program, involves roundups where as many as 1,500 police and military agents sweep into barrios in helicopters, trucks, on motorcycles, on foot and, where there is river access, rapid launch assault boats. The agents arrest all the young men they can find, pack them in trucks and take them to precincts where they are “processed” to determine if any are wanted for crimes.

In lieu of the poverty in the DR, and especially the poverty among underpaid police agents who thrive on corruption, barrio round-ups forebode frightening societal rift. Impoverished young men—many of whom are genuinely engaged in productive activities and employment–report that during the raids police confiscate cell phones and seize money. In order to obtain quick release they must pay bribes. The degree to which this has become an arbitrary system of repression is evident in the few statistics made public. On May 1st 2005, for example, 800 agents swept through a low income barrio called Capotillo and arrested 317 young men, seized their possessions, hauled them away to a detention center, whereupon they identified eight with outstanding warrants (Hoy 2 of May 2005 page 8). The other 309 detainees were reportedly charged a 300 peso processing fee and released. On the other hand collusion with police is also evident in reports from drug dealers apprehended during the raids. One informant (the brother of a girlfriend) who regularly pays police agents in his neighborhood for the right to distribute drugs, described to me how the police had taken the crack cocaine that he was selling, When they released him, they returned his cocaine. But  there was one gram missing, “Can you believe that,” the young man complained, “those faggots must have smoked it.”

Joining the Crime Wave: The Emerging Government Industry of Crime

The police in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic have also met increasing crime in another way, by profiting from it. In Haiti the police have largely lost control even of taxing crime. Paychecks often come late, sometimes as much as nine months late. With little other alternatives and almost no respect from the people, the police have reacted in some cases kidnapping narcotraffickers or their family members and demanding ransom,  in other cases by becoming narcotraffickers themselves, in still other cases by stealing from narcotraffickers, and in some cases by stealing from individuals, banks and other institutions. But it is a delicate balance and police know that retribution comes easily. When apprehended smugglers usually give the police one or several kilos of whatever they are carrying, usually cocaine. Demanding too much can lead to retaliation. Once when I lived in Port-de-Paix Haiti, a policeman checked a small plane that had landed at the local airport. Inside was a Haitian pilot and lightskinned latin man, and several hundred kilos of cocaine. The latin man gave the cop a kilo of Cocaine. The cop took it and was walking away. Apparently had second thoughts and wanted more. The latin shot him dead with a pistol (several vehicles then pulled onto the runway and unloaded the cocaine. But pep la through up roadblocks and wound up getting most of it).

It is also widely believed that the police have frequently carried out major heists. Whether genuine policemen or not, uniformed individuals are common assailants. The police defend themselves explaining that anyone could buy or have a uniform made. But there have been substantiated incidences, such as a case in 1996 when U.S. special forces removed the Haitian presidential security detail because they had obtained credible information that two of them were involved in a bank robbery in which four people were murdered.

In the Dominican Republic the situation is similar. The police have been suspected of involvement in a number of high profile armed robberies, such as a Western Union heist in which three security guards were killed and the current chief of police investigations in Santo Domingo was implicated (information courtesy of one of my fellow inmates who was on his eighth year of incarcaration for participating–that was one guy who was doing real time).

But more significant than the occasional dramatic heist carried out in highly ordered military fashion by men dressed in police or military uniforms is the high profile and increasingly institutionalized involvement of the authorities in crime. Contrary to the constitution, the police are the primary justice system and the great majority of criminal cases end with them. As seen, the police punish many crimes immediately. They act as informal judges, punishers who beat individuals when caught flagrant delicto and executioners for those extremely violent criminals who attempt to operate outside police control, or who perform acts of unacceptable violence against society or crimes of property against coporations and the rich. But the police also profit from the existence of crime through institutionalized bribery, as tax collectors from narcotraffickers, and through the confiscation and resale of stolen good, drugs, arms, and money.

They put a value on a crime.When the police are brought into adjudicate a domestic dispute or traffic accident, the disputants are often locked up and they must pay for the service of having been ‘rescued’ from themselves or, if you prefer, having the dispute mediated by the police.  Most citizens ardently try to avoid police involvement.  But even when the police become involved in a dispute in which one party is clearly in the right—such as rape or physical attack, there are fees.  In my first involvement with police in the Dominican Republic  another driver struck my car.  Not being able to collect I reported the incident to the police. The police accompanied me to the man’s house; threatened to kill his dogs when he did not come outside; and in the end collected 5,000 pesos (about US$300 at the time). They took half.

In this way the Dominican police, as an institution, is probably better understood not so much as part of a process of combating criminality as it is a system of regularizing, controlling, and in many instances monopolizing it. But lest it be thought that cases such as the above are exceptional and low level deviations from Dominican ‘law and order,’ some of the recent high profile incidences illustrate a police culture of criminal involvement familiar to all Dominicans:

• In 2004 with a change in the government administration, the former police chief and 54 other officials were indicted for possession of 365 stolen luxury vehicles. Their defense: It is “Dominican police culture” to keep stolen property. They were acquitted (Hoy 27 April 2005).
• On July 8th 2005,  El Caribe newpaper reported that 25,000 of the 32,000 fulltime Dominican National Police agents were not physically on the job, but rather  working for private individuals.  They are permitted to exploit their special privileges as agents of the law—something that as seen below is tantamount to a license to kill– to market themselves as relatively high paid body guards in exchange for leaving their modest paychecks in the hands of superiors . How many of their employers were actually criminals themselves, narcotraffickers and high level? No one knows. Nor would it behoove anyone to investigate (El Caribe 8 July 2005).
• The fact that crime is growing at a spectacular rate and that police are directly involved, not just as combatants, but as institutionalized participants is evident in the exploding homicide rate. Of the 1,513 Homicides reported in the first six months of 2005, 300 were caused by active duty police or military, another 82 by off duty agents and 503 by unknown assailants–many of which people attribute to the police (Hoy 31 August 2005).   In the first six months of 2005 the rate of homicide carried out by police approached twice that of all homicide in the Dominican Republic 25 years earlier; police and military officers officially killed 382 people in the first six months of 2005 versus a total of 533 homicides in the DR for the entire year 1980.  It could be argued that the police kill more in the endeavor to fight crime.  And surely this is partially the case.  But they also freelance. Several widely publicized instances illustrate the point.  In 2003 the head of investigations of the National Police—a recent replacement after the former chief of investigations accused of murdering and quartering a Greek national– was himself accused of murder for hire. His accuser, a 62 year old assassin who had worked on Dominican death squads and with the CIA for more than four decades.  The professional assassin appeared in an interview on national television.  In fear for his life after a high profile murder of another assassin (involved in the crime I’m about to describe), he accused the chief of police of investigations of being directly responsible for the murder of the head of the Senate committee for control of drugs (a senator).  The Chief of Investigations was reportedly paid one million dollars. In the well publicized developments that ensued the Dominican nation watched as it was revealed that the gun used to  kill the senator was in fact borrowed from the police evidence room; the courts, including the Dominican Supreme Court, refused to hear the case declaring themselves incompetent to render a judgment; the Chief of investigation came for a 60 minute interview with the Attorney General accompanied by 150 armed escorts; the attorney general subsequently resigned, saying corruption in the country kept him from doing his job; both the head of the death squad and his partner were subsequently murdered (the head of the death squad was gunned down by a pair on a motorcycle; his partner got “depressed” and committed ‘suicide’– in the street), as was one of the assassins who had carried out the killing (he was stabbed in custody five hours after the Senator’s widow went public and announced that she had learned of a plot to ‘shut up’ her husbands assassins). Investigations never went further.  The police Chief of Investigations, the man accused of orchestrating the crime, kept his post (HOY MISMO, 1 July 2002).

The preceding are but a few of the highly publicized facts supporting the dominant role that Dominican enforcers of justice exercise as part of what can only be called a culture of criminality. This is the image of the highest level of the police presented to the Dominican public via the press.  But the police profiteering is widespread at all levels. Well known among the men in prison with me and people in impoverished barrios throughout the country is that police tend to be involved at every level of organized crime, from seizing contraband, including firearms and narcotics for resale to taxing the neighborhood drug pushers to more gruesome and very public executions of people  who challenge their domain, including other police and military agents (some 30% of all homicides are between police or military, i.e.. them killing one another.  As one of the few street pushers in prison explained to me, “The problem was a change in colonels, I didn’t know who to pay. It’s all clear now.” He was in fact released after two months of incarceration; today his two puntos—“points” from where he sells drugs—are thriving. Nice guy, by the way. Once explained to me, ‘i’m not a lawyer, not a doctor, i can’t fix a car and i don’t know how to farm. all i know is how to sell drugs, that’ s my job, that’s what i do. now if they would just leave me alone…’)

Prosecution of police is almost non existent. Of 250 known extrajudicial killings committed during 2000, less than 10 of the cases were sent to the courts; most are dropped; of the few followed up by international human rights groups one was found guilty and sentenced to four months in prison. One was sentenced to eight years and then made bail, after he was convicted, and was back on the street.

Indeed, so thorough is the corruption that the mark of the drug dealer in the Dominican Republic is often the presence of police and military men. Successful criminals surround themselves with military and police officers or quickly integrate into the police military bureaucracy by purchasing a position, a practice exemplified by what was until recently the most high profile U.S. criminal trial involving Dominicans: Paulino Quirino, a Dominican Army Capitan with no former military training, commissioned in 2001 by then President Mejia Hippolito, who in 2005 DEA agents arrested in possession of 1,387 kilos of cocaine.  Quirino is currently serving time in the U.S. along with another 22 military officers and wealthy Dominican nationals who were involved in his Dominican drug cartel.

The Fiscalia (equivalent  to the District Attorney ‘s office in the United States)

When the fiscalia gets a new case from the police they have an official hearing to decide whether or not to proceed with the case. The investigations and evidence usually come from the police and consist of little more than a description of the evidence and, in the case impoverished detainees involved in theft, robbery or violent crimes, a report based on a police interrogation in which, as seen earlier, the accused is encouraged to respond through techniques of affixation, hanging by the arms, and beatings.

If the fiscal decide to proceed then the detainee is sent to the penitentiary for ninety days of what is called “preventative prison,” while the case is investigated further. In reality, however, the fiscalia rarely makes any further investigations. Nor do Dominican citizens expect them to. Nor do most cases ever arrive at trial. Ninety five percent or more of cases that came through theForteleza de San Felipe—where I was imprisoned–ended with bail.

This bail system I describe here explains why despite the high rates of crime there are so very few people incarcerated in the Dominican Republic. It also explains why most of those people who are in prison have not had a trial, Few prisoners ever get one. They get out.  And, the very last thing that most of them want is a trial: to be sentenced increases the cost of getting out.

One could view the system that I am describing  as a type of pre-trial intervention, or plea bargaining.  That might be one reason why outsiders misunderstand the system. In the US, the accused is arrested, arraigned, jailed, granted bail and then pre-trial legal negotiation begins, if unsuccessful there is a trial and, if found guilty, conviction, sentencing, and imprisonment for a specified period of time. In the Dominican Republic, as I suspect is true in most developing countries, it’s very different. The individual is arrested and jailed, he or she may then pay the police and be released; if  arraigned then he or she either pays the fiscalia bail immediately or is imprisoned, and at that point negotiations and pre-trial intervention takes place.But the end result is almost always bail. Once bail has been paid then–while still ‘on the books’ and in the formal system–the overwhelming majority cases are never pursued.

It is in fact formally called bail, fiansa.  But adding to the confusion, the actual bails are seldom officially registered and hence international human rights organizations continue to believe, as seen in the introduction, that bail is seldom granted. Afterward most cases are, as said, forgotten: no trial, no due process, no evaluation of evidence. As for the original ninety days of detainment, that is merely a formality. As for investigation, in most cases there are never any investigations and the prisoner may be inside prison for less time or he may be detained for much longer. Legally, the fiscalia can and sometimes does go through the formality of requesting additional time to investigate. The second time it has the right to ask for an additional eight months. This is invariably a stopgap measure used to pressure the accused into paying a bribe (or higher fiansa) or as a result of pressure or payments from the victim and or victim’s family.

The exceptions to the preceding are three: 1) those instances in which no one pushes a case—when a defendant has no family or the family does not wish to help and hence has no lawyer, 2) those cases pushed by victims, usually a powerful individual, family, or a company that hires a lawyer and investigators to prosecute the defendant and 3) those cases when foreign organizations associated with aid donors, such as the DEA and FBI are involved in a drug case or foreign embassies have an interest in a case, such as when a foreign national has been killed. In these instances the accused is often sentenced. But even in the event that a defendant is sentenced, all is not lost. As mentioned earlier, the DR may be the only country in the world where prisoners routinely make “bail” after they have been convicted. DR1.com , the major English News source for the Dominican Republic, reported that of 3,086 prisoners convicted in year 2002-2003, 53% of whom were convicted for murder and drug violations, 2,612  (85%) purchased executive pardons (DR1.com July, 28 2004).  In the case of the assasinated senator seen earlier, when caught two of the assassins had already been convicted of murder and were ‘supposed’ to be serving out thirty year prison sentences.

Of definitive importance regarding how fast an inmate can make bail and how much it will cost are, 1) how Dominican the inmate is, 2) if he or she has contacts, and 3) how much money he or she appears to have:

With the exception of a few high profile and token political cases–in which case they are sent to the luxury prison Najayo when one can own multi suite cells and install his own jacuzzi–rich and connected Dominicans who live in the country are above the law.  they don’t go to prison. Not for murder, not for drugs, not for illegal voyages. They run people over in the street, embezzle, rape, and kill people and unless the person is of their status, the issue is settled quietly.

Of those who actually get subjected to the justice system–meaning officially arrested and charged– middle and lower class Dominicans who live in the country move through the system as or faster than anyone and pay less, much less than anyone else.  For a drug case they may pay as little or less than 5,000 pesos.  Dominicans with residency in foreign countries, almost all of whom are in for trying to pass through the airport with drugs, might spend a year inside and they are going to pay 50,000 to 200,000 pesos bail but they needn’t worry about staying, not for drugs, there is not one Dominican local or foreign resident in here that has been convicted for drugs.  Plenty waiting for bail, but none convicted. Gringos or other foreigners, if they don’t come up with money, lots of it, get sentenced.

Bob who had the kilo of heroin in his platform shoes could get his hands on only $10,000, that’s all his father would give him; the lawyer cheated him out of that and so he found himself going down for five years.  The Spanish guy is the same, his family is poor and try to convince a Dominican justice that you are a poor Spaniard: He too got five years.  The Dominican authorities want their money and they don’t want foreigners bluffing them.  A guy from Caricou, arrested at the airport for two kilos of cocaine, was granted a 200,000 peso  bail  (about US$6,000).  He couldn’t pay. The judge gave him 10 years. It is definitively a biased system: Jose spent two weeks here; and I, as will be seen, spent four months.  Jose paid 10,000 pesos; it cost me one million.  But the system works; at least in the sense that foreigners cough up the money as can be attested by the fact that although some three or four dozen gringos pass through here every year only two who are in here now have been sentenced.

If the detainee has the money to pay and no one is pushing hard against him/her then they can make bail faster than otherwise.  The lawyer gives secretaries little gifts (money) and they get the case put higher on the list. People with money and contacts pass through the prison in days.  Drug cases take longer than any other cases and the reason is because they are those most touched by the formal system via US DEA

There also seems to be some power structure in relation to the collection of bail for particular cases. While I was incarcerated virtually all drug cases would get denied at pre-trial in Puerto Plata and sent to appeals court in Santiago, the regional power seat. In Santiago virtually all drug trials not involving a foreign national were settled for bail.   Bail in all but major political cases means, as I have said, liberty.  The trial is forgotten, papers get lost.

Even in the case of murder there is a price to be paid and few inmates get sentenced.  One inmate I knew was asked to pay one million peso bail. Another inmate was telling me that it was too much, “You have to negotiate with them, they want too much money.  Look, the first time I went down for killing someone they wanted 120,000 pesos.  I told my Dad, ‘Dad, yeah, its true, I killed that guy.  But he wasn’t worth no 120,000 pesos.’  We paid 70,000.  The second time we paid…..”  (This guy was twenty five years old and on his third killing accusation; he would almost certainly be killed soon by the police)

While it may all seem corrupt to observers accustomed to the codified legal system, the bail system I am describing is far more efficient than the codified legal system that most lawyers and foreign observers believe prevails.  The annual turnover rate in prison inmates in the Forteleza de St. Felipe, Puerta Plata, where I was imprisoned, was seven; meaning that contrary to official reports of slow processing rates, the total number of detainees who passed through that prison each year—based on the four months that I was there– is seven times the prison population at any given moment. Put another way, the average prison stay is less than two months.

The average murder gets out in several days to one or two years.  If he gets sentenced it is a minimum of five years in prison. The sentenced inmates are the exceptions, those cases that are pushed by a victim’s family, a corporation that has been robbed or powerful individual who has been wronged.  In these cases there may be a trial and the accused sentenced. More on that in a moment.

The Dominican legal system has enjoyed massive infusions of money from the US government to reform and train judges, lawyers, and prosecutors. Trips to the US. eminars.  The fiscalia DA does not want the DEA or foreign embassies seeing people who they participated in arresting back at the airport with another load of drugs, at least not too fast.  After three months to a year, about the average time in prison for people caught at the airport with drugs, the detainee makes bail and is free to leave the country.

No one wants to be sentenced. And the judges don’t want to sentence people. Money is the issue and as seen they can’t sentence too many people.  It is physically impossible because there is not enough space in the prison system. So aside from the financial benefits, lawyers and judges must keep the doors revolving. They have no choice.

The beauty of the system with its image of ninety day investigations and bail is that it gives the image of due process and allows justices to at least tell themselves that they are honest and following procedure.  It is emphatically a system void of due process and focused on making money with minimum effort.  (I don’t know it is clear to the reader, the justice system is one of political patronage.  Although it is supposed to be changing, most judges, D.As, and prosecutors get their job by virtue of being connected to the political party in power and when a new party comes into power there is a major change in personnel.)

All this that I have described above was supposed to have changed last September 2005 with the implementation of a new legal code, one that was supposed to bring the D.R. into line with United Nations human rights charters and modern justice procedures.  Detainees are supposed to be formally charged within 48 hours, have a lawyer present, the burden of proof is no longer on the accused but on the D.A.,  the police are not supposed to torture detainees, investigations are mandatory, minors now have rights, prosecutors are supposed to have the physical evidence present with them in court.  None of this happens. And attempts at applying the new codes even by the highest legal authorities are rather pathetic demonstrations of incompetency. The man who was arrested with me—I’ll call him Jose- was tortured and with pressure from a politician and the evidence of Jose’s chemically burned eyes and beaten body, the judge released him on habeas corpus.  They allowed him to go home and then they re-arrested him, didn’t beat him this time, but sent him to prison. (Ultimately however, Jose is a better example of nepotism in the system.  He was re-arrested because it looked bad for the DA that no Dominicans were in prison for the crime that I was accused of—I was accused of organizing an illegal boat voyage. A poor member of a powerful family but with a cousin who is among the most powerful justices in the country and family members in the military and high levels of the political parties, Jose was released in three weeks and for only a 10,000 fiansa. In my case they held me for three days before charging me, but to get around the 48 hour requirement said that they had dropped charges in Santo Domingo and then given me a lift to Puerta Plato where I was re-arrested again.  They sent me to the Forteleza for 90 days so they could do investigations and then sent me back to the Forteleza for another 8 months and they still did no investigations (I in fact only stayed in for another month).

Back to the central point, no one wants to be sentenced and only special cases get that far.  The only Dominicans in the Forteleza who have been sentenced are those who committed atrocious crimes or killed someone whose family was pushing the case.  Mathias spent seventeen years here for killing his wife and burning her body. The wife belonged to a politically powerful family and they pushed the case. Same with the Preacher. When he gets out he will have done 10 years. Marino was sentenced and has been in for eight years, he killed a foreign homosexual, not good for the Dominican Republic’s image to be turning him back out on the street.  Mako and his two partners killed a German and have been here for three years without trial but if the justices ever get around to it the three will be sentenced and will be staying here for a long time: No one wants to get the attention of the German ambassador.  The man who has been inside the Forteleza the longest, 22 years, raped and killed his mother; Dominican’s don’t like that (the guys is obviously crazy and other prisoners say that he had been raping his mother for years, that he simply went completely over the edge and killed her). Davi robbed a Western Union and killed three guards; he has been in eight years and still has not been sentenced (rumor is that a high ranking police officer was involved and so it has been kept out of the courts).  Luis , Fausto and three others are in here for having kidnapped one of the wealthiest Dominicans on this part of the island; they got twenty years.

The system, I am convinced, is efficient. And for the most part, most of the people up here are guilty, of something.

The victims of the system, so to speak, are the severely impoverished, mentally handicapped and the occasional person who crossed someone powerful, a high ranking military officer or politician.  Those are the people who get convicted or who have been on the inside for years or decades without being tried and I am completely confident when I say that they are victims of something else, wronging someone important, being insane or simply of having a family that does not care enough to push to get them out.  Like Maguay, the big, semi crippled guy who lives in a box over the bathroom.

Maguay drove a motorcycle taxi, a common profession here, running errands, fetching food from restaurants, looking for car parts, delivering items.  He was taking a break, sitting in a greasy little restaurant when four men came in. According to the other prisoners, these were young toughs, looking for trouble. They knew Maguay, one decided to pick on him, said something insulting to Maguay, who got up and moved away. The guy kept after Maguay and, as things go, they faced off. The guy hit Maguay in the head with a bottle. When Maguay fell to the ground, the guy stabbed him twice and was kicking him. Maguay managed to get hold of a butter knife that was on a table and stabbed the guy in his leg. Maguay then jumped on his motor bike and took off.  The guy jumped on his own bike and took off after him. Maguay must have hit the femoral artery because the guy bled to death. “He was a bad guy,”  Maguay tells me, “Everyone knows that. He had hurt a lot of people.  But can you imagine that, he bled to death from a leg wound.”  Who knows.  But for me Maguay is such a simple guy, dumb, honest, that I believe him.  Other inmates have told me that there were some dozen witnesses and all say that Maguay was innocent.  If it ever gets to trial Maquay, everyone expects, will be set free.  Little question that if Maguay were educated or from a wealthier family or had some money of his own he would never have come in here in the first place. But he doesn’t have money or contacts, his family is poor, and with the judges, D.As, and prosecutors busy making money on bail hearings, it may take years for him to get to trial.  Most likely they will one day simply give him bail for 500 or 1,000 pesos, whatever they can get and make room for a new inmate.

Lawyers

The biggest human rights violation going on in the prisons is arguably the lawyers.  I can’t say enough about it.  The lawyers are the worst.  Like doctors, they are the ones who can cure you and they come by and tell you how they can, how sure they are, how the deal is worked out.  Most are lying.  It happens with frightening frequency.  They con the poorest prisoners out of 500 and 1,000 pesos and don’t even file the papers for bail; sometimes con the rich ones out of hundreds of thousands and even millions and don’t even show up for court.

An American I’ll call Bob was caught with heroin is his platform shoes. Bob gave his lawyer US$10,000 for the promise that he would get him out. The lawyer said that he had a commitment from the judge that he was going to bribe him. Apparently he did not have a commitment nor did he bribe him. Bob was sentenced to ten years. The lawyer had ten days to appeal and knowing that Bob was not going to give him any more money, he didn’t do it. Frank a Dominican who lives in the country and who got arrested with his boss when they dropped the woman in the wheel chair packed with cocaine at the airport.  Frank didn’t have the money to pay bail but the boss paid a 150,000 peso bail and got out immediately, promising to come back for Frank.  When I got here Frank had been waiting two months. He left six weeks after my arrival. His lawyer had gotten his bail down to 40,000 pesos but would not let Frank out if he did not pay s 150,000 peso lawyer fee.   Frank couldn’t pay.  His family came over with a lawyer cousin of Frank’s, they went to the court house and by that afternoon Frank was free for 6,000 pesos (US$150).

The African, Dako, is one of the saddest cases.  He got railroaded by the Dominican justice system and the lawyers.  He has been here for three years, been to court 21 times and still has not been sentenced. The word is that even if they did sentence him, they could only give him six months to two years because he was not actually caught with drugs in his possession.  But obviously what happened was that the judges were waiting for bribes and the lawyers were not paying them.  Dako says that lawyers—six different ones– duped him over and over, telling him they would get him out, that a judge wanted some money.  All totaled he has given 50,000 Euros to lawyers and nothing has happened. His problem is that his wife and children are in Holland, his relatives in Ghana. He has no contacts here in the Dominican Republic to push his case, no one to cry to the Fiscal, make sure the lawyers are doing the job, that they are paying the bribes.  The latest legal shenanigan:  He went to court right before Christmas, for the 20th time, and the court officials had lost the accusation papers. The judge said the law was that they had to have the originals. If you think that means they throw the case out, you’re wrong. He went back to court after Christmas and they still hadn’t found the papers. One really would think they would let him go.  But they haven’t.  It illustrates the attitude and competence level of Dominican judges and is almost funny—if it was not a man’s life:  They lost the accusation papers so they will just leave him in jail until he pays someone to come up with new papers.   Again, they were obviously waiting for a bribe.

The French guy I’ll call Jean Louis, had come to the DR to fetch his sister in law, two step children, and 33 other family members of Dominicans living in Guadalupe.  Unlike most organizers of illegal voyages–who send the boats out overloaded and without so much as a radio– Jean Louis took every precaution to protect the passengers.  Indeed that may have been his undoing.  Jean Louis rented a brand new $300,000 catamaran equipped with the most up to date safety features.  He had an emergency life boat equipped with a new outboard engine, 40 life preservers, a dingy, and computer navigation with integrated autopilot, radar and GPS.  When the Navy arrested Jean Louis they thought they were going to confiscate the catamaran.  When they discovered that it had been leased they did the next best thing, they stripped it of $30,000 worth of electronic equipment (I know because I watched them do it).  They also confiscated his cash amounting to over $50,000 and all the belongings of the passengers on board.  After being arrested Jean Louis, who didn’t speak Spanish, never saw an interpreter.   His deposition papers were falsified and forged.  He was then sent to the Fort with four of the six Dominican’s who had arranged the voyage, collected the money, and who worked aboard the boat. In the ensuing three months the Dominicans were released. Ten months later, as I write this, Jean Louis is still here.  He has been in prison now for over one year.  He has been through four lawyers, all of whom collected money—a total of ten thousand dollars which is all he had, and might be why he is still here. Jean Louis says the lawyers collected money for work they never did and then abandoned him.  Now he is totally broke. The French Embassy will do nothing.  The last time Jean Louis was in court was six months ago and the judge could not make a decision because like Dako, Jean Louis’s file had been lost.  It is probably best for the Dominican authorities who stripped the boat that Jean Louis stay right here, safely locked away and quiet.  As for Jean Louis, he doesn’t know when or if ever he will get out. The judge is obviously waiting for a bribe and Jean Louis doesn’t have it.

The lawyers, many of them who are also working for the Fiscalia, play God, acting like they can make this or that defense and they already know the outcome.  A lot of the lawyers probably do talk to the judges and together they probably do set a bribe price and then if the inmate is desperate enough to give money up front the lawyer simply pockets the money and lets the inmate try again with another lawyer. What are you going to do, complain that they stole your bribe? (There have been lawsuits over reneged bribes. The one that comes to mind is an aid to the president who people were paying for promised visas.  He never delivered and a testament to how entrenched corruption is in this country, the ‘wronged’ parties filed a class law suit for breach of promise, the judges accepted it and the newspapers reported on the case as if there was nothing unusual about it. And in fact, there isn’t.  Bribes for visas or diplomatic passports are common.  The going rate is 150,000 pesos.  More recently there is a case where a group of inmates are suing the Dominican Attorney General for having taken money for pardons that were not received.

I could go on with lawyer stories.  I have been approached by at least a dozen. They try all sorts of tactics. Last week the head of the largest and only Dominican human rights organization showed up at the prison.  He had me taken up the hill to this restaurant type bar in the military barracks.  Really nice set up, thatch roof, dance floor, mahogany bar, splendid view of the city, harbor, beaches, and sea.  We are seated at a table, me him and this other slick looking Dominican.  Señor Human Rights is telling me that my constitutional rights have been violated and I should do something, like get a good human rights lawyer.  I tell him thanks but no thanks and then he’s talking friendly, about human rights, and he says, “the greatest violation of human rights up here are the lawyers, they are cheating prisoners and nothing is being done about it.”  Well I know that.  Then the other guy cuts in.  Turns out he just happens to be a lawyer who could represent me, and he starts telling me how he can get me off, how my case has been handled wrong.  Now I know that I am being screwed. It does not take a lawyer to figure that out. But I don’t know anything about this guy, this supposed lawyer, and beyond the suit and tie he is wearing he doesn’t strike me as any more educated than many of the prisoners, so I ask him, as if I don’t know, “what exactly is this thing they call a habeas corpus”  He doesn’t know.

Inside the Penitentiary

Officially Dominican prisons are managed by a Warden responsible for the prison. In reality a military officer has de facto control.  Most Dominican prisons have no guards on the inside but are governed by a “commission” of inmates. The president of the commision negotiates and works with the military officer. He attains his position through a wide array of methods: Sometimes appointment by the military officer, sometimes election by the inmates, and sometimes by violent upheaval.  But no matter how the president is chosen, control depends on intimidation and violence and final decisions are made by or worked out in negotiation with military officer in charge.

The commission, like a State, monopolizes violence.  Commission members carry weapons, knives, baseball bats and in most cases the president of the commission has one or several firearms that he keeps hidden away.  There is big money and big power at stake as the commission also monopolizes contraband, lottery sales, loan sharking, the distribution of cells (which are sold at a fee) and collects taxes on everything from visitations to haircuts and the sale of food.  Most of all, however, there is the drug trade.   In the largest Dominican prisons, such as La Victoria (population >3,000), the sale of drugs is worth millions of dollars.  Commission members, particularly the president, often make so much money that they pay to stay in prison.  The commission president in La Victoria is reputedly a powerful strongman with one hundred armed commission members working for him, typically the most ruthless and violent of the inmates, and direct ties to colonels and generals who are responsible for the prison—the current chief of police was formerly in charge of La Victoria prison—and who reputedly receives a large share of drug and contraband profits in exchange for their support and cooperation.

The type of violence that can come from a struggle for control of a prison.

On March 7th 2005, in an event that eerily foreshadowed developments that were to come in the Forteleza, where I was incarcerated, we awoke to the news of a riot in another Dominican prison, Higuey, in which more than 138 out of a total prison population of 460 men were killed.  It was a fight for control over drugs sales in the prison. Several men had obtained pistols.  They locked a cell block down and set fire to it, killing their adversaries and another 130 men.

The Forteleza, where I was imprisoned was, like Higuey, a much smaller version of La Victoria.  The inmate population grew in the four long months I was incarcerated from a population of 250 to 600 men. There were only 20 commission members and I calculate profits from drug sales at US$8,000 per month. I had a privileged view of the drug sales by virtue of the fact that I lived in a cell with one of the higher ranking commission members. Commission members openly snorted cocaine, the favorite drug in the Forteleza.

Shortly after I arrived in the Forteleza the president of the commission was released. Through a mixture of intimidation, violence and a bribe to the military major in charge a new inmate I will call Curtis, a man with three murder charges against him, took over.  At the beginning of his tenure, Curtis was jovial and friendly with most inmates but he soon seized control of all the businesses and began a pattern of intimidation that included using a baseball bat to beat inmates who he decided had broken rules.  In some respects the beatings took on an air of morality.  Curtis especially did not like sex offenders and would beat accused sex offenders when they arrived.  He beat two men who were violent with their wives on visiting day; he beat a man for masturbating; and he beat a man for saying that he, Curtis, was being too abusive.

After the Higuey incident described above, when the issue of prison riots became an important topic among most of the inmates in the Forteleza.  I learned that before Higuey, the bloodiest riot in Dominican history was at a prison called La Vega (2002).  A riot in which twenty-nine people were killed.    I also learned that it was led by none other than the man I am calling Curtis.  Curtis himself led the La Vega motin and was reputedly responsible for the deaths, three of which he was formerly charged for.

With the Higuey riot and the international attention it attracted, the authorities became concerned about Curtis.  The warden, under pressure from his superiors and aware of Curtis’s increasingly violent behavior, did not want to be responsible for another bloody, at least not at that politically sensitive moment in time.  Curtis made matters worse when he broke an inmates arm during one of his increasingly frequent baseball bat beatings. The Warden signed papers ordering Curtis to be transferred out of the Forteleza and to another prison.  Faced with losing a level of income that most had never earned and might never again earn in their lives, and also knowing that the Major himself sponsored their drug sales and was happy with his profits, Curtis and the commission members promptly staged a riot.  They changed the padlock on the prison entrance, piled mattresses at the bars and set them afire.  Prisoners ran through the building looting the stores.  One of the commission members stabbed five men he accused of conspiring against the Commission.  Some twenty sex offenders were beaten.   On the second day of the riot Curtis rounded up four foreign inmates and, using them as hostages, chained them to the bars near the entrance, piled mattresses around them, soaked them and the mattresses with buckets of paint thinner and threatened to set the the men afire if he was not allowed to stay on as Commission president.  In the end, and in a fantastic twist of justice, Curtis conspired with the Major—with whom he shared profits from control of the prison and who was responsible for investigating the riot– and they publicly blamed the Warden for instigating the riot and accused the Warden of smuggling and distributing drugs to the inmates.  The Warden was fired from his job and Curtis stayed on as president of the commission.  Curtis and the Major had won.  For the time being.   One month later, in another spat of violence, he was removed, a new president took over and a new and some say more severe round of violence, abuse, and struggle to maintain control of drug and contraband sales began.