Don’t Get Locked Up in Puerto Rico
We were decades ahead in abolishing capital punishment, yet the state meets people with death at a staggering rate.
Author’s note: CW:Death in jails and prisons. 10 October 2024 is the 22nd World Day Against the Death Penalty. In this piece I avoid explanatory commas to speed up the story, but look to the footnotes for robust explainers. This is the first time these figures are being presented side by side with US figures for proper context, laying the groundwork for intersectional and inclusive policy considerations.
There’s a breezy little airbnb on the west coast, in the crevice of a neighborhood, like many neighborhoods across Puerto Rico, that exists as a mirage. They are little boom districts that sprout up around existing neighborhoods and take advantage of the housing crisis. Grazing land is being turned to copy-and-pasted condo units and four family homes are torn down to make one monstrous million-dollar museum-modeled mansion. And the majority are kept vacant, used as airbnbs for ladies named Scottie from South Carolina1 or held onto by Nuyoricans waiting to retire so they can move home. For the better part of a year, Alex and I lived in this neighborhood, Guerrero, in this breezy airbnb long before it was finished: a cement box with no electricity or running water, but that’s another story. Just a few blocks away, however, on the edge of the neighborhood, other people experiencing houselessness without such good fortune as ourselves were dying on the floors of a jail that most Puerto Ricans have never heard of, let alone the tourists coming for the long weekend.
“Found unconscious…no vitals.”2 “Found unconscious on the floor of his cell…passed away while being examined.”3 “Found dead in his cell… no signs of violence.”4
The news outlets publish the police report without question or commentary, and they never know what happened.
Guerrero Correctional Institute, the only pretrial detention center of its size, is the third largest carceral facility in Puerto Rico and site of the third most deaths. The massive jail is pressed up so close to the neighbors that armed guards watch from towers the elderly people sitting on the porch to escape the heat indoors. The year we lived in Guerrero, more people died in Puerto Rico’s jails and prisons than ever recorded, at a rate more than 4 times the US average. It was one exceptionally bad year in an already five-alarm increase of deaths inside Puerto Rico’s jails and prisons. Ironically though, our criminal incarceration system, as deadly as it is, on paper is more liberal than most of the US. By result of generations of advocacy, art, and legislative work, we have no private prisons nor death penalty, incarcerated people have access to higher education, vocational training, and a protected right to vote from behind bars, and contrary to mass incarceration elsewhere, our jails and prisons continue to be shut down, cutting our incarcerated population to just 1/3 its size in 20 years. On the other hand, according to the actual experiences of people incarcerated—poor hygiene, abuse, overcrowding, displacement, negligence—our prison system is by far the worst, and all the death might just be a cost-cutting measure.