Mar 11, 2018
Preventative Detention is a crime against humanity.
I can remember one Red Cross inspection, of the National Penitentiary, during the 1991 – 1994 Embargo Period, in which fewer than 500 were locked up there.
We must take steps to rectify this unfortunate situation, which popped up after Aristide’s return from exile. Our courts are overloaded and have absolutely no hope of dealing with those already locked up, let along the deluge of new arrests that occur every day.
Lao Tzu – the Chinese philosopher said it quite simple:
“Every journey begins with a single step.”
And so it is, with the end to PREVENTATIVE DETENTION.
FIRST STEP TO JUSTICE
Whenever someone wants to arrive at a accounting solution, an inventory of products must be made. In this case, the products are human beings. Our JUSTICE MINISTER must initiate the solution with a few simple steps:
Each jail facility must do an inventory of prisoners held in their facility.
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How many prisoners in facility?
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Create a dossier for each prisoner. There will be some that have no dossier and this must be corrected, otherwise these people will be lost forever..
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Each prisoner’s dossier should contain the date of arrest, crime suspected, and date of court appearance, if any. Over 80% will probably fail the 48 hour limit before court appearance in that they never have appeared in court.
Would also be useful to note what the maximum sentence might be, if the person were guilty.
Even a sadist would admit that 3.5 years, without appearing in court, is too much for a suspected cell phone thief.
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Dossiers for those already convicted of a crime will go into one pile.
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Create two other piles. SERIOUS and NON-SERIOUS crimes. At this time, we are only concerned with non-serious crimes –
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SERIOUS CRIMES are not our focus at the moment. Just the 8000, 9000 who might have been locked up for several years, without any court appearance, for some minor or no offence at all.
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Once we have our Inventory of Bodies President Moise can have his government move on to the next step.
Unfortunately, the present, perceived transient nature of our Cabinet has effectively frozen everything in place.
Perhaps President Moise could install one special ombudsman to deal with the one issue of PREVENTATIVE DETENTION.
