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Dominican Republic The Prison System
The code of criminal procedure also covered the
operations of
the nation's prison system. The law required each judicial
district, or province, to maintain one prison for
convicted
offenders and another for accused individuals awaiting
trial.
Provincial governors bore responsibility for the
maintenance of
these prisons and for their security. The national
penitentiary
was La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo; all
individuals
sentenced to more than two years of imprisonment served
their
sentences in La Victoria. This penitentiary had shoe,
carpenter,
tailor, and barber shops, as well as other facilities
where
convicts could be taught a useful trade. Prisoners able to
take
advantage of such opportunities received wages for their
labor.
Police officers ran the nation's prisons. In the late
1980s, the
head of La Victoria Penitentiary was a police brigadier
general.
In practice, the corrections system received inadequate
financing, and it suffered from unsanitary conditions and
overcrowding. The government publicly acknowledged this
problem
in 1988 and announced its intention to develop a solution.
As a
first step, badly needed repairs were begun on La
Victoria. These
long overdue measures were prompted in part by a riot at
the
prison in June 1988 in which two inmates were killed.
Reports in
the local press cited two conflicting causes of the riot.
One
version held that the prisoners rioted to protest a move
to limit
visiting hours. The second explanation, offered by the
government, suggested that the violence was instigated by
drug
traffickers angered by government's pressure on the
narcotics
trade.
Although the Dominican Republic's domestic situation
was much
more stable in the late 1980s than that of neighboring
Haiti, the
potential existed for localized, or even generalized,
disturbances. Economic conditions--inflation, devaluation,
food
shortages--usually underlay most riots or demonstrations.
Marxist
and other radical leftist groups, however, often sought to
exacerbate such upheavals in order to discredit the
government.
This situation placed considerable pressure on the police
and the
armed forces to respond to civil unrest in a professional
manner
and to minimize attendant injuries to civilians.
Furthermore,
this role as the institutional bulwark of elected civilian
government was one that the leadership of the police and
the
armed forces took very seriously, particularly because it
constituted their primary mission in the late twentieth
century.
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As of mid-1989, no definitive studies dealing
comprehensively
with national security matters in the contemporary
Dominican
Republic had been published. A general treatment of modern
Dominican political life, touching on the military and its
place
in national life, can be found in G. Pope Atkins's Arms
and
Politics in the Dominican Republic. The most complete
coverage of the history and development of the armed
forces is
contained in the section on the Dominican Republic in
Adrian
English's Armed Forces of Latin America. For
developments
since the early 1980s, the reader must search through
issues of
the Latin American Report, prepared by the Joint
Publications Research Service, and the Daily Report:
Latin
Report, put out by the Foreign Broadcast Information
Service.
Current order of battle data are available in the
International
Institute of Strategic Studies' excellent annual, The
Military
Balance. The best overview of conditions of public
order is
contained in the section on the Dominican Republic in
Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices, a report submitted
annually by the United States Department of State to the
United
States Congress. (For further information and complete
citations,
see Dominican Republic -
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1989
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