“Prison is a horrible place, regardless of whether or not it’s painted nicely, or if the food is good,” Josué Montijo told the audience at the University of Puerto Rico’s Law School L-1 lecture hall last Tuesday night, “because prison is violence.”
So began “Prison Experiences”, a forum organized by the Pro Bono Services for the Prison Community Group (Pro Bono Servicios de la Comunidad Penal) in order for attendees to “understand the experiences of those convicted of a crime, the circumstances that led them to commit the crime, and their personal struggles through rehabilitation and reinsertion in society,” according to the event’s description on the UPR Law School Facebook page.
The forum began with Montijo, author of the book Los Ñeta, giving a brief historical overview of Puerto Rico’s correctional system during the exceptionally violent 1970s and 80s, two decades infamously covered by the local media because of the brutal gang wars taking place in Puerto Rico’s prisons. Montijo, who interviewed both prisoners and guards, described the inhumane prison conditions during those years.
“Not only were the prisons overcrowded, unhygienic, and lacking proper medical services, the inmates were subject to violence, sexual assaults, and overall physical and emotional abuse at the hands of other prisoners and guards,” said Montijo. Some members of the prison community responded by creating the Ñeta Association, formally known as the Association for Inmates’ Rights (Asociación Pro-Derechos de los Confinados), providing solidarity and assistance to other inmates in need. Los Ñeta succeeded in organizing a hierarchal group that not only protected its members from potential violence but also eventually served as a regulating apparatus within the prison system as a whole. Their rules and values, which Ñeta members are expected to follow, are strongly influenced by the idea of brotherhood and conflict resolution through discussion, not violence.
The “Prison Experiences” panel (from left to right): Josué Montijo, Raul Hernández Mercado, and Santos Villarán Gutierrez (and Fernando Picó in audience, in white).
After Montijo’s academic standpoint on the prison experience came the testimonies of the other panelists, Raul Hernández Mercado and Santos Villarán Gutierrez, two ex-inmates currently out on parole. Raul Hernández Mercado was just seventeen years old when he was convicted of murder in 1987 and sentenced to 154 years in prison. Hernández Mercado describes himself at that time as “ignorant and full of insecurities” and believes that his harsh sentencing, in addition the fact that he was the first minor in the history of Puerto Rico to be tried as an adult, was due to discrimination against his low socioeconomic status. He entered prison without a high school education and was placed in a maximum-security cell. While most allow themselves to despair at their situation because, Hernández Mercado assures the audience, “you live through terrible things there,” he tried to maintain a more positive perspective.
“The important thing is what you want and how you visualize your future,” he said. He focused on continuing his education through the Collegiate Inmates program (Encarcelados Universitarios), founded by the legendary Fernando Picó, and attributed his interest in the arts with keeping him on track and motivated. “I began to think of prison as an educative institution and not prison,” he explained, “that way, time seemed to go by faster.” After 25 years in prison, Hernández Mercado was granted parole and dedicates himself to the plastic arts.
Before sharing his experiences, the last panelist, Santos Villarán Gutierrez, looked at the audience and stated, “This is a calling. A calling for this country’s correctional system to be all that it could be.”
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Villarán Gutierrez was born and raised in one of the low-income projects in Puerto Rico that we know as residenciales, where he lived with his alcoholic mother and two sisters, one with mental health issues and the other physically disabled. He recalls seeing his father only when he would come around to their apartment in order to “get what he wanted” from Villarán Gutierrez’s mother. During his turbulent adolescence, his friends started selling drugs, starting with marihuana and later moving on to cocaine, heroin, and eventually crack.
Villarán Gutierrez became involved in the drug dealing in order to make money. He explains that fighting between rival drug lords and the State-issued ‘war on drugs’ meant that the money was no longer flowing in like it used to, and so he and his friends decided to rob a local store. It was during this, their first holdup, that an employee was accidentally shot and killed. Villarán Gutierrez and his friends were arrested, tried, and he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. “I’ll never forget the noise of the cell gates, how they open and close behind you. It was like entering another dimension where everything had ended for me,” he remembers, recounting the tense environment he had suddenly entered, the hostile prison guards taking away personal belongings and other inmates taking advantage of others. “Everyone wanted to kill each other. It wasn’t just inmates fighting with inmates. They had conflicts with guards, and the guards fought within themselves, too.”
He describes a period where he stopped eating because his food would be mixed with ground glass and rocks. “Prison is a jungle where you don’t live. You survive… Life there is unbearable, a Dantesque reality,” Villarán Gutierrez said, making reference to Dante’s hellish Inferno. He would spend 23 hours in his cell and would be taken out for exactly one hour of recreation “sometimes,” he explains, “if there was a guard to take me. Sometimes there wasn’t.” He said those long hours were crucial for him to take part in a process of introspection that led him to examine his choices and “why things were the way they were”. After being transferred to the Guayama 945 Correctional Center, Villarán Gutierrez and other inmates decided to look into the idea of an art workshop “out of an abundance of creativity. We sold it to the administration as a therapeutical program but it wasn’t just about making art for the sake of making art,” he said, “it was about interpreting how we felt.”
After succeeding in convincing the superintendence to allow an art workshop, Villarán Gutierrez and his group wanted to create a union but were barred by a law that did not allow inmates to organize themselves in such a way. After a particularly insistent letter writing campaign, they succeeded in overturning the law and organizing themselves as the Cooperativa de Servicios Arigos with Villarán Gutierrez as its president. The rest was history, he went on to get a bachelor’s degree from the University of Turabo and a Master’s in Social Work with an emphasis on children and mothers from the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences campus.
Both Villarán Gutierrez and Hernández Mercado stressed the importance of having goals and interests in order to aid the rehabilitation process in prison. Although not part of the panel, Dr. Fernando Picó, who was present in the audience and a key figure in both men’s lives, briefly addressed the audience: “The message that one receives when incarcerated is that you’re worthless, and the system continuously keeps on hammering that into you, consciously or subconsciously… and the terrible thing is that the person oftentimes internalizes that message.” He concluded by citing French existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte’s famous words, “A person’s project is not in the past, but in the future.”
The rehabilitation of an inmate is a feat in and of itself due to the incredible amount of adversity created by a system that continues punishing them long after their sentence is served: not only is an inmate’s freedom taken away while they are in prison, not only are the destitute physical conditions of their surroundings and the violence they are subject to at the hands of others dehumanizing and forcing them to adapt to a world that does not regulate itself according to the rules of unimprisoned society, but they are marginalized by society after leaving prison, making the process of social reinsertion practically impossible. “No one hires someone with a criminal record,” asserts Picó, sharing a story of an intelligent young man who finished his degree while in prison under the impression it would help him in finding a job. Once released, however, no one would hire him because of his record. Seeing no other choice, he returned to the drug business and was killed shortly after. This fundamental problem, along with a lack of emphasis on rehabilitation, needs solutions in order to for not only the correctional system but also society in general to become more effective. The panelists believe, Villarán Gutierrez especially, in the importance of education as a preventative measure against delinquency and as the key to finding the answers to the contradictions in the Puerto Rican penal system.
*The pictures were taken from:
UPR Law School Forum