“The United States somehow thinks it has something to teach Black people in Haiti about prisons.”
U.S. imperialism never runs out of tricks to play on Haiti. The latest project of the U.S. overseers who overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected government in 2004, is prison-building. The new penitentiaries will be constructed under the auspices of none other than the Narcotics Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy to Haiti. U.S. narcs care so deeply for the Haitian people, they are building them two prisons, one for men and one for women.
The top U.S. narcotics agent at the embassy says America’s concern is humanitarian. The men’s prison will replace the penitentiary that was destroyed in the coup sponsored by the United States in 2004 – so it would be fair to say that Washington owes Haiti that prison. The lack of prison space and other public safety infrastructure means Haiti’s incarcerated population – which is somewhere between two and three thousand – is held in some of the worst conditions in the world, and for a very long time. The U.S. embassy says it wants to reduce overcrowding, disease and violence in Haiti’s prisons, to bring them up to international standards.
The United States, itself, has never paid much attention to international standards when it comes to prisons. It locks far more people up for far longer periods of time than any other developed country. On any given day, 50,000 to 80,000 U.S. prison inmates are held in solitary confinement, some of them for decades at a stretch – a form of torture according to most international standards. Violence in U.S. prisons is endemic, especially rape. Through its sheer size, alone – encompassing one out of every four prison inmates on the planet – the U.S. prison Gulag contains the greatest concentrations of prison evils in the world. The U.S. serves as an example of how not to treat prisoners, and how not to treat Black people, who are far more likely to wind up in U.S. prisoners at some point in their lives. But, the United States somehow thinks it has something to teach Black people in Haiti about prisons.