They’re known as “frog men,” inmates who are forced to sleep on prison floors across the Dominican Republic, often next to overflowing toilets or holes in the ground that serve as one.
Thousands of them are crammed into the country’s severely overcrowded prisons, some operating at seven times their capacity. A majority languish there without ever having been charged with a crime, and activists warn they face inhuman conditions and a lack of medical care.
Despite promises to improve the system, critics say the Dominican Republic continues to push for and allow pretrial detentions in nearly all criminal cases where no charges have been filed and has made few changes as problems within prisons keep mounting.
“Prisons have become no man’s land,” said Rodolfo Valentín Santos, director of the Dominican Republic’s National Public Defense Office.
Over 60% of the country’s roughly 26,000 inmates are being held under preventive detention, without any charges, according to the National Public Defense Office. Proponents argue the measure aims to protect society and allows authorities time to collect evidence in a case.
But some detainees have spent up to 20 years in prison without ever being found guilty of a crime, Valentín said.
He noted that the country’s Constitution and penal code dictate that preventive detention is an “exceptional” measure. There are six other measures that don’t involve prison time, including bail, but Valentín said they are rarely used.
On a recent afternoon, Darwin Lugo and Yason Guzmán walked out of La Victoria National Penitentiary, in the northeast corner of the sprawling capital, Santo Domingo.
The prison was built for a maximum of 2,100 inmates but holds more than 7,000 of them, with more than 3,300 under pretrial detention, according to the National Public Defense Office.
It is the country’s oldest and most populated prison.
“You have to watch out for your life,” said Lugo, who with Guzmán visited several friends held there, some under pretrial detention.
“There are a lot of them who are not doing well,” Guzmán said of inmates there. “There’s extreme poverty.”
They said their friends, who have spent more than five years incarcerated there, are well-connected and only occasionally request money or ask that their cell phone’s SIM card be recharged.
Last year, at least 11 inmates died at La Victoria following a short circuit in a cell that sparked a fire and an explosion. It was one of the country’s deadliest prison fires since 2005, when at least 134 inmates were killed in the eastern town of Higüey after rival gangs set their bedding ablaze.
After last year’s fire at La Victoria, Dominican President Luis Abinader appointed former prisons director Roberto Santana as head of a commission tasked with overhauling and improving the country’s more than 40 prisons.
“We must admit, gentlemen, that we have a situation in all of the country’s prisons,” Abinader said when he announced the appointment last March. He also announced that money recovered from corruption cases would help fund construction of new prisons.
Santana has long called for the closure of La Victoria and the 15 de Azua prison, located in the country’s western region. The commission he leads is working on those and other monumental tasks, free from outside interference, he said.
“We don’t take orders from politicians or anyone else,” said Santana, who previously trained staff for the new prisons built in the early 2000s.
Santana, who once served as president of the Federation of Dominican Students in the 1970s, was arrested multiple times under President Joaquín Balaguer, known for having political opponents and dissidents jailed and sometimes killed.
Santana knows first-hand the conditions of La Victoria — he spent two years in solitary confinement there.
