Feliciano v. Barcelo

• Decision Date: 03 January 1979
• Docket Number: Civ. No. 79-4.
• Citation: 497 F. Supp. 14
• Parties: Carlos Morales FELICIANO et al., Plaintiffs, v. Carlos Romero BARCELO et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Puerto Rico

497 F. Supp. 14

Carlos Morales FELICIANO et al., Plaintiffs, v. Carlos Romero BARCELO et al., Defendants.

Civ. No. 79-4.

United States District Court, D. Puerto Rico.

January 3, 1979.

Harvey B. Nachman, Santurce, P. R., Servicios Legales de P. R., Inc., Río Piedras, P. R., for plaintiffs.

Raúl Juan Escudero, Dept. of Justice, San Juan, P. R., Robert B. Donnin, Mayda Colón Tsaknis, Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, Washington, D. C., for defendants.

OPINION AND ORDER

PEREZ-GIMENEZ, District Judge.

This action involves the alleged violations of the rights of prisoners and pre-trial detainees confined by the Administration of Correction of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. This type of case has grown as rivers grow-deeper, wider and with a crescendo of speed and noise as they approach the oceans. This watercourse has not sprouted overnight, but has developed through the years from a small creek to its present size.¹ The instant action is as ambitious an action as we have seen reported anywhere. The entire correctional system of the Commonwealth is challenged on the ground that it violates the due process rights, the equal protection rights, the rights of free association, and the right of access to the courts, as well as the right to be free or rid of cruel and unusual punishment.

Plaintiffs are all persons incarcerated under the custody of the Administrator of Correction and the defendants are the Governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Administrator of Correction and the present and some former members of the Parole Board of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The action was filed in early 1979, but has a genealogy of other class actions previously filed and decided by this Court.²

After nearly a year and a half of extensive discovery, most of which was bitterly contested, the plaintiffs procured orders to distribute questionnaires, to have experts visit selected institutions and to take both motion pictures and still photographs of the institutions. The picture taking was governed by stringent regulations to prevent any possibility of either public disclosure or revelation of prison security. With the pictures and reports of the experts, the plaintiffs moved for a Preliminary Injunction and for Emergency, Provisional and Extraordinary Relief. That motion was accompanied by affidavits from five experts,³ the qualifications of whom were uncontested; portions of the depositions of the Administrator of Correction; and, copies of various Standards or Draft Standards of national organizations or governments.⁴

Convinced that a prima facie showing had been made in relation to basic health and custodial care, this Court issued an Order to Show Cause on May 9, 1980, directing the defendants to file, if they so desired, a response to the Motion for Preliminary Injunction not later than May 21, 1980, and that the hearing on the Show Cause Order commence on May 27, 1980. The plaintiffs requested emergency relief in nine designated areas:

1. To close the "calabozos" or dungeons to human occupation;

2. To transfer all known psychotics or other definable mentally ill inmates out of the prison system into mental hospitals or other institutions designed to treat such persons;

3. To screen all incoming inmates, whether convicted persons or pretrial detainees, to separate the psychotics for removal;

4. To screen the entire prison population for contagious, infectious, respiratory and venereal diseases and for such other physical conditions such as epilepsy, diabetes, blood pressure, liver disorders, and to continue to do such screening of every inmate admitted to the system in the future;

5. To reduce the population of every institution under the authority of the Administrator of Correction to a number compatible with minimum physical and mental health standards;

6. To provide each inmate with a personal living space of at least seventy (70) square feet and at least five (5) hours a day outside of such confinement;

7. To provide each inmate who requires, a special diet for medical or religious reasons, with such a diet;

8. To provide (or to advise the Court what was needed to so provide) with staff, facilities and supplies necessary to deliver adequate health care and adequate sanitation to all the institutions operated by or under the authority of the Administration of Correction;

9. Provide a psychological and psychiatric screening of all persons confined in the institutions.

The Court heard a total of 45 witnesses, carefully scrutinized all the exhibits admitted into evidence, including the four hundred (400) photographs, the selected medical and psychological records, the motion pictures of each of the closed institutions and of Sabana Hoyos Prison Camp, and all the papers filed by the attorneys for the parties. In addition to the thousands of pages of documentary evidence, the Court has re-read the transcript of proceedings of nearly 3,000 pages and all of the cases cited by the parties. The Court cannot delay any further this ruling.

The Administration of Correction of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is an integrated system structured by statute to find effective ways of providing individualized treatment to foster rehabilitation. 4 L.P. R.A. 1111, 1112.⁵ The legislature of Puerto Rico recognized its obligation of providing adequate medical care and hospital services. 4 L.P.R.A. 1112(f). Rehabilitation and humanitarian treatment is mandated not only in the organizing statute, 4 L.P.R.A. 1111-1125, inclusive, but in a number of the provisions of the Constitution of Puerto Rico. Article II, Section 1; Article II, Section 7; Article II, Section 1; Article II, Section 12; and Article VI, Section 19.

Because the Court finds that the defendants have so blatantly violated the federal Constitution's interdiction against cruel and unusual punishment, it becomes unnecessary to pass upon the plaintiffs' various claims of denials of due process, of statutory due process, or of equal protection of the laws. The importance of these statutes heretofore mentioned is that they negate any local or state justification or mitigating circumstances. Puerto Rico, by its laws, recognizes its duty and obligations to its prisoners and pre-trial detainees.⁶ The statutory obligations imposed upon the executives of the local government are more exacting than the reported decisions on the minimum quality of treatment required by the Eighth Amendment. There is no justification for the cruel and brutalizing conditions and treatment that the penal and pre-trial populations of Puerto Rico's prisons are compelled to endure. What has been shown the Court might be incredible to a naive person who accepted the presumption that legal duties are followed were it not for the fact that all these horrors have been preserved on film and frequently, in the records or lack of records of the several institutions.

Psychotic mad men are kept for weeks and months, (some pre-trial detainees) caged like animals, without clothes, without toilet facilities, without medicines, forced to eat with their hands and in most cases without ever having been seen by a doctor. Others, presumably sane, seeking asylum from threats of death or serious injury in the general penal population, lose all their privileges, all programs for possible rehabilitation, all chance for parole, all recreation, while they are locked in dungeons called "calabozos".

Prisoners and pre-trial detainees die from lack of medical treatment. Epileptics inflict upon themselves or suffer injuries which are too often fatal. Suicides are alarmingly frequent, but not so staggering to the mind as the number of violent deaths that the Court has reviewed. Raw sewage runs in dormitories and kitchens; toilets in all closed institutions do not work; prescriptions do not get filled; bed and mattresses are not provided; nor, for that matter is soap, toothpaste or toothbrushes, or sufficient toilet paper. Food has to be destroyed everywhere because it has been contaminated by rats or other vermin. Usually, people cannot see a doctor unless the prison guards acquiesce. They cannot be sent to a hospital if ordered by a physician unless there are enough prison guards available. There is no screening of incoming inmates and apart from check-ups made every six months by federal authorities for venereal disease, many prisoners never see a physician or are they given a medical examination. The only psychiatric screening that the overwhelming number of inmates receive is the untrained subjective evaluation of the prison guard. Overcrowding, the basic evil of each closed institution, is so intense that in some areas, such as the "Q" or quarantine section of the Bayamón Regional Institution, where pre-trial detainees constitute the overwhelming majority, the inmate may have no more than fifteen (15) square feet of living space.

This evidence presented by the plaintiffs was not controverted. Defendants and their experts admitted all these shortcomings, as did the witnesses who were subpoenaed from the Administration of Correction. An emergency exists. The fundamental Constitutional guarantees of these prisoners have been and are being violated daily. The Court cannot, in view of the evidence, and the fact that half-hearted attempts to correct anything have only been made at the eleventh hour, most of them during the hearing, stay its hand or defer to the local authorities.⁷ The Court accepts its jurisdiction and its responsibility. An injunction shall issue.

Findings of Fact

1. The Administration of Correction is a governmental agency that operates all the institutions where pre-trial detainees are kept and convicted persons are housed. It is an integrated agency.

2. There are nineteen (19) institutions in all, ten (10) of them designated as closed institutions: Aguadilla, Arecibo, Ponce, Guayama, Bayamón, Humacao, Vega Alta Industrial School for Women, Miramar Young Adults Institution,...