by Dady Chery (Haiti Liberte)
Haiti’s incarceration rate
of roughly 100 prisoners per 100,000 citizens in 2016 was the lowest in
the Caribbean. Nevertheless, there is a systematic campaign underway for more
prisons. Canada and Norway have each given one prison to Haiti. Thanks to
prison aid from the United States, three additional prisons have been
inaugurated since 2016, and another is under construction.
In the Dominican Republic, Puerto
Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba, the incarceration rates per 100,000 people in 2016
were 232, 350, 145, and 510, respectively. These numbers alone do not tell the
whole story, because the large majority of Haiti’s prison population are pre-trial detainees,
many of whom are members of Aristide’s administration, resisters against
government abuses like land expropriation, or political protestors who have not
been charged with a crime. If Haiti were to release them, the incarceration
rate would drop to about 30 per 100,000, which is lower than in Norway, Sweden,
or Japan. Furthermore, if we consider the fact that another group of
incarcerated people are Haitian nationals who have lived as legal residents of
the United States or Canada nearly all of their lives and committed crimes
abroad, then the real incarceration rate of Haitians drops to one of the lowest
in the world.
