By YVES COLON

 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The United States tried to help bring about judicial reforms in Haiti several years ago, spending millions through the
 United States Agency for International Development.

 Critics say most of that money was lost because of an incompetent contractor. U.S. officials, meanwhile, say they made gains in training and
 educating judges as part of the USAID program.

 Clifford Larose, the head of Haiti's prison system and a former journalist and militant in President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Family Lavalas party,
 touts some marginal prison system ``improvements,'' but doesn't hide his embarrassment. He runs the 19 prisons in Haiti with the same $2.5
 million budget that was approved by Parliament in 1995. Back then, he notes, the prisons held 1,500 inmates. Now they hold more than double that number.

 "That's the Haitian reality,'' said Larose.

 But, said Jean-Paul Lupien, a French Canadian who consults for the United Nations Development Program, it's not enough for officials like Larose just to be aware of the conditions.

 "It's time for them to pass on to action,'' he said. ``Prisons are one of the lowest priorities for them.''

 Lupien explains the official indifference as a cultural bias. When he first brought up the idea of spending $4.5 million to put tin roofs on cells, which provided prisoners no shelter from the elements, officials laughed at him, he said.

 "They said to me, 'You want to spend $4 million on prisoners and we can't even feed our people,' '' Lupien recalled. "Here prisoners are trash. You don't look at trash, you don't care about trash.''

 Even without the proper resources, Larose said he wants to do the right thing, where he can. Dressed in a brown suit, Larose recently strolled with visitors along
 Penitentier National's crumbling yellow walls, which are crowned with a loop of razor wire. At one of the guard posts, he found a tape recorder that belonged to an officer. He broke it.

 "The rule is no distractions on the wall,'' Larose said, as he confidently walked away from the grumbling officer.

 There are 130 officers, many of them former military men who are badly paid, to guard the inmates in the entire prison system. Larose said he needs twice that number.

 At Penitentier National, only the six guards in the watch towers carry weapons.

 During his walk, Larose snapped at a couple of naked male prisoners taking a bath in the courtyard. He wanted them to face the wall. Inmates bathe in the open, picking water from a bucket and pouring it over their heads.

 Warden Jean-Daniel René, 31, said running the jail isn't easy.

 "You find the same problems here you find outside,'' René said. "We have food problems, water problems, no money to buy gas to drive the prisoners when they need to go to court, sanitation, medicine, you name it.''

 When he makes a request for special funding, René said, the check has to go through a dozen offices before it gets to him.

 "It's not an easy job,'' he said.

 Each cell block has a courtyard, with names like Bois Verna, Titanic, Brik, Quartier Rok. Titanic is a three-story unpainted building that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the old walls. It is where authorities keep the most dangerous inmates, mostly drug dealers, many of them Colombians who have taken advantage of Haiti's political instability to transfer cocaine to the United States, mainly through mules or on ships that dock at the Miami River. There are about 20 Haitians deported from the United States and Canada in the jail, René said.

 The courtyards are paved now. Before, prisoners used the rocks in the yard to stone the guards.

 Amnesty International, in a 1996 report, said it was pleased with improvements in Haiti's jails. Officials at least were keeping up-to-date lists of inmates.

 "Though still poor by international standards, prison conditions have gradually shown a marked improvement over those that existed in the past,'' the report said.
"However, overcrowding, resulting mainly from long delays in the judicial process, is still a serious problem and has provoked tensions in some prisons. Sanitary
 conditions, food supplies and health care, on the other hand, are said to have generally improved in most places.''

 That was five years ago. Even the latter is no longer true in Haiti now.

                                    © 2001