By David McFadden
Associated Press
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The U.S. Virgin Islands should be penalized for chronic failure to improve conditions at its main jail facility despite 13 years of court orders, inmate advocates told a federal judge Thursday.
The islands should be fined for contempt, said Eric Balaban, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who alleged that guards have beaten inmates, left mentally ill prisoners untreated and that weapons and drugs are ubiquitous.
Balaban said federal court orders to improve conditions at the Virgin Islands Criminal Justice Complex have gone unheeded since the mid-1990s.
“The continued lack of commitment by officials in the Virgin Islands to improving the conditions in the jail is unconscionable,” he said.
The Virgin Islands have been held in contempt four times for failing to improve the 97-bed jail in St. Thomas.
U.S. District Judge Stanley S. Brotman, who presided over Thursday’s hearing, has declined to impose sanctions in the past, saying he hoped that “hazardous conditions” would be fixed.
But a correctional medicine expert who toured the complex testified that the islands’ Bureau of Corrections has consistently failed to provide adequate mental health services to ill detainees as mandated in previous court orders.
“Immediate intervention is essential to ensure that prisoners are getting the mental and medical health care that they are constitutionally entitled to,” added attorney Benjamin Currence, co-counsel in the case.
The government is working on transferring mentally ill inmates elsewhere, territory Attorney General Vincent Frazer has said previously.
Neither he nor government spokesman Jean Greaux responded to calls and an e-mail seeking comment on Thursday’s hearing.
Court proceedings are expected to resume Tuesday.