By The Star Staff
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) presents “a worrying administrative deficiency and is in disarray,” members of the Incoming Transition Committee said earlier this week after agency officials deposed at a government transition hearing.
“The consensus we saw is that this department needs dramatic, profound changes and that it is in a difficult position,” Jorge Colberg Toro said at a press conference on Monday afternoon following the hearing.
Bayamón Mayor Ramón Luis Rivera Cruz, who is heading governor-elect Jenniffer Gonzalez Colon’s transition team, added: “This is an agency that the new administration will have to look at closely and see what dramatic changes can be made to it.”
“We have serious concerns about it, because we have noticed considerable administrative failures, a lack of public policy, questionable decision-making, and money management that is not [conducted] in the best way, in a careful way,” Rivera Cruz said.
During the hearing, DCR Secretary Ana Escobar Pabón said that before ending her term of trust at the agency she will make a decision on the eight employees who attended to the case of Hermes Ávila Vázquez, a convicted murderer who was granted an early release from prison on medical grounds and ended up killing again.
“It is my responsibility and I am going to take it,” Escobar Pabón said in response to questions from Colberg Toro at the hearing.
Regarding Physician Correctional, the company that provides medical services in the island’s correctional institutions, she said she will not cancel the contract, although she is waiting for the Licensing Board’s decision on the doctors involved in the aforementioned release process.
So far, only a nurse who had a romantic relationship with Ávila Vázquez has been dismissed.
Ávila Vázquez, who pleaded guilty to the April femicide of 56-year-old Ivette Joan Meléndez Vega in Manatí, had been released on parole in April 2023, under Law 25 of 1992. The parole was granted because the doctors who evaluated him concluded that the inmate had limiting health conditions.
During Colberg Toro’s question time, attention was drawn to the fact that the statistics that the agency is supposed to publish on different profiles have not been updated, in some cases since 2019. The official insisted that she has updated information or is in the process of updating it.
“I promise to look for all the information with the Department’s statistics area and I am surprised that the statistical data that we collect is not there, because if there is an office that is responsible, apart from all the others in the Department, and that fully complies with the entry of information with the Statistics Institute, it is the agency’s statistics and information area,” Escobar Pabón said.
During Sen. Juan Zaragoza Gómez’s question time, the DCR secretary was asked about the use of non-recurring federal funds for recurring payments. The official denied using federal funds for such purposes, but later acknowledged that $24 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds are being used to pay the $500 salary increases to correctional officers. She said that once the funds run out on Dec. 31 of this year, the central government will have to allocate funds in the budget to make the payments.
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