El Centro de Periodismo Investigativo es una organización sin fines de lucro que reconoce que el requisito fundamental para las aspiraciones democráticas es que la ciudadanía esté bien informada y que existan entidades independientes con la capacidad de fiscalizar los poderes que accionan en la sociedad, sean públicos o privados.
Ante la negativa de la Compañía de Turismo a entregar la lista de los negocios de alquiler a corto plazo en Puerto Rico, el Centro de Periodismo Investigativo presentó un recurso especial.
Tras el proceso eleccionario con más candidatos de su historia, los miembros del Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) seleccionaron a la periodista y directora ejecutiva de Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) en Puerto Rico, Carla Minet, como una de las nuevas integrantes de su Junta de Directores.
Members of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) selected Carla Minet, executive director of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico, as a new board member.
Los datos incompletos sobre las defunciones de los últimos dos años entregados por el Registro Demográfico al Centro de Periodismo Investigativo causaron que esta organización volviera a demandar al secretario de Salud, Carlos Mellado López, y a la directora de dicha agencia, Wanda Llovet Díaz.
Incomplete data on deaths from the last two years that the Demographic Registry delivered to the Center for Investigative Journalism prompted this organization to again sue Health Secretary Carlos Mellado López and the registry´s Director Wanda Llovet Díaz.
For Samuel Serrano, going to prison is like disappearing. And he knows from experience that many stay inside. He is Puerto Rican, owns an auto repair shop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the state with the most people born in Puerto Rico serving sentences in state prisons.
There are 788 persons who were born in Puerto Rico and are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison just in the six states with the largest Puerto Rican population — Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — according to data from December 2022 and February 2023, the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish) found.
There were 1.2 million people incarcerated in the United States by the end of 2021. One in seven is sentenced to life in prison, more than 200,000 in total, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that investigates racial discrimination in the US penal system.
Pennsylvania is the third state with the largest Puerto Rican population in the United States. But it has more Puerto Ricans incarcerated and sentenced to life in prison than Florida, the state with the largest Puerto Rican population.
Puerto Rican cultural symbols could be seen in Kensington’s businesses. Photo by Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“Pennsylvania’s punishment is exceptionally harsh compared to other states… Pennsylvania has the second highest number of people with life without parole sentences in the country,” said Andrea Lindsay, director of Strategic Initiatives at Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, an organization that provides free legal services to low-income individuals with criminal records.
It took Serrano an escape and two imprisonments that combined took away almost a decade of freedom, but he got out. He reappeared in the same neighborhood where they arrested him: Kensington, north of Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania.
It’s been 26 years since Serrano served his last sentence. And now, one morning in early summer, Serrano is taking care of a client in his auto repair shop, kneeling with a flashlight shining under a car, while smoking a cigarette. When he’s done, he goes into an office that he has in the same workshop and sits behind a desk. When he remembers something, he looks up and crosses his hands over his chest. If he mentions a street, he points to the air as if indicating its direction.
Samuel Serrano sits in his office surrounded by familiar photos. Photo by Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Fifth and Glenwood streets meet in Fairhill, a Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia. There is a bodega there called “La Familia Latina.” And almost next to it seats a broken-down brick building: an abandoned factory bordering a railroad track, a vestige of a vanished industrial age. Serrano’s auto shop is half an hour from that corner, in Kensington, another predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood in this section of the city known as North Philly.
“I’m born and raised here in Philly. My mom is from San Lorenzo and my dad is from Ponce, Puerto Rico,” Serrano says in Spanish with a bit of an accent. The phone rings and to answer it he switches to English: “What’s up brother? I’m good…” The father worked for the city Sanitation Department and the mother worked at home. They emigrated from Puerto Rico when they were 20 years old, in the 1970s.
The guys who disappeared from the streets and whom Serrano saw again when he was arrested were also Puerto Ricans from this dense area of the city, where there are gardens with statues of the Virgin Mary, flanked by Puerto Rican flags and big speakers blasting salsa.
In Fairhill, in North Philadelphia, an abandoned factory recalls the vanished industrial age. Photo by Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
The leading causes of incarceration among Puerto Ricans in the United States are drug trafficking and first-degree murder.
Of the 274 Puerto Ricans who are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison in Pennsylvania, 199 were sentenced to life without parole, the CPI found. And another 75 have sentences of 50 years or more, something that is classified as a “virtual life sentence” by The Sentencing Project.
Among Puerto Ricans sentenced to life without parole in Pennsylvania, 192 were charged with first-degree murder, which is when the victim’s death is considered intentional. And 34 were charged with second-degree murder, which is when the victim’s death is considered unintentional. Pennsylvania imposes a mandatory life sentence on those accused of second-degree murder, which includes people who had no direct role in the victim’s death.
In 2021, Lindsay published a study on the population sentenced to life in prison, without the right to parole, for second-degree murder in Pennsylvania. And it revealed that 73.3% of that prison population was 25 years old or younger when charged. Additionally, four out of five were “people of color,” a term used in the United States to encompass a diverse range of “non-white” people; and seven in 10 identified as Black people.
“Putting this data out there was an opportunity to be able to think with more facts about like, what are we actually talking about and who are we talking about with these sentences,” Lindsay said in an interview with the CPI.
Most of the Puerto Ricans incarcerated in Pennsylvania are at State Correctional Institution, in Chester, 35-minute drive distance from Philadelphia. Map data ©2022 Google
There are people born in almost every municipality in Puerto Rico who are incarcerated in Pennsylvania. Some birth town names are recorded by the Pennsylvania Department of Correction with errors, such as Myia West, for Mayagüez, Aponito for Aibonito, Luguillo for Luquillo, Ballamon for Bayamón, Mega Baja for Vega Baja, and San Sevassta for San Sebastián.
Among the 1,431 Puerto Ricans incarcerated in Pennsylvania, 60 noted that their legal place of residence was Puerto Rico. The others reported Pennsylvania as the place of residence. But there are also Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico, residents of the states of Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Kansas, California, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas, serving sentences in Pennsylvania.
In the documents that the Pennsylvania Department of Correction provided to the CPI, those sentenced have entry and exit dates. In the case of those sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison, the release date box appears blank. Others have exit dates like January 16, 2172.
“[In prison] we killed time, as they say, playing basketball, handball, baseball. Everyone gets along well,” says Serrano. He again speaks in the present, as if he had not left there. The wall behind him is lined with framed certificates, licenses, and permits, along with photos of his wife and his two children, a two-year-old and a three-year-old. Outside the office, the grinding noise of the workshop is heard, where two employees, also Puerto Ricans, work.
“Although, there are always problems, you know what I mean,” Serrano continues.
It’s been 26 years since Serrano served his last sentence. Photo by Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Serrano first disappeared from the streets of North Philly in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, and the “Law and Order” policy was in force. During that year he was held in a juvenile detention center, in cabins surrounded by trees in a semi-rural area of Pennsylvania.
He calls it “the school” because they offered classes and workshops there. If he completed the chores and behaved, he earned points that turned into permission to visit his family on weekends. He was also given a weekly stipend. Officially called Sleighton Farm School, it was founded with the mission of “re-educating youth at-risk, most from unstable homes.”
Every time he was let out, Serrano was memorizing the path. He started saving the stipend. A year and a half passed until one night, together with two friends, they opened one door, then another: they emerged into a dark and grassy landscape. They walked, says Serrano, “by the properties of the white people there, of the Americans,” green yards with large white wooden houses. They were going in the direction of the only train station through which they could escape.
But there the detention center guards were waiting for them.
The only choice they had left was to run down the tracks. They ran, and they reached another station. And they waited until the Market Frankfurt Line train, the “L,” arrived, headed for Kensington, Philadelphia. The guards looked “everywhere” for Serrano. They went to his mother’s house several times. But he had been living on the streets since he was 13 years old. He was 16 then, and they never found him.
“I was bad, I sold drugs, I smoked, young… I used crack, heroin, cocaine, I used everything. And my mom couldn’t stand me, so she threw me out.”
Manuscript map of Kensington in Philadelphia. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican diaspora settled in Kensington and Fairhill, North Philadelphia, after it was displaced by racism and gentrification from the Spring Garden neighborhood during the height of deindustrialization in the late 1970s. When they arrived in North Philadelphia “they were literally refugees from that neighborhood, simultaneous with also a very poor greater migration [from Puerto Rico],” says anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, in an interview with the CPI.
With no jobs in that part of the city, devastated by government austerity and factory closures, a large part of the Puerto Rican diaspora joined the “global narcotics market” that came to unseat the area’s economic vacuum, Bourgois explains.
One of the largest drug markets on the East Coast operates between the neighborhoods of Kensington and Fairhill, where Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican diaspora is clustered, and the poverty and incarceration rates are the highest in the entire city.
Puerto Rican flag waves in a window on a residential street in the Kensington neighborhood, in Philadelphia. Photo by Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Reagan’s failed war on drugs was still raging in 1988. That year, the city of Philadelphia was poised to break its murder record. By the end of the year there would be 400. One morning, at about six o’clock, a dozen patrol cars surrounded a block of Kensington. They arrested around 15 people. One of them was Serrano. He was 18, he was already an adult, so he would have to serve three years in state prison.
“My cellmate in state was a boy I had known since I was 10 years old, from Hunting Park [another North Philadelphia neighborhood]. A Boricua from the streets for real. He was doing 10 years. He’s settled down now and is remodeling houses. In any prison you go to, you will meet someone from the street,” says Serrano.
In 1988, the year that Serrano went to state prison, eight other Puerto Ricans were incarcerated in Pennsylvania. In 2023 there are still incarcerated, seven of them sentenced to life in prison for first degree murder. The other one, incarcerated for rape, is suppose to be released in 2036.
That does not mean that they were the only Puerto Ricans to be incarcerated that year. Because those who have already completed their sentences don’t appear on the lists the CPI got from the correction departments of the six states with the most Puerto Ricans.
If Serrano were still in prison, he wouldn’t appear on that list either. Because they only counted those born in Puerto Rico, the rest, Puerto Ricans born in the United States like Serrano, were left invisible among the categories of White, Black o Hispanic, broad and ambiguous terms that have made Puerto Ricans and the national origin of Latino people invisible since forever.
Serrano works Monday through Saturday in his auto repair shop in Kensington, where he was born and raised.Photo by Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Serrano was released from state prison in 1992. He went back to his old ways, to the same neighborhood of his native Philadelphia, but to a different corner. Before he was on the corner of Hancock and Dauphin Streets, or 5th and Glenwood. Each one of Serrano’s arrests has cardinal points and dates that mark a map — territorial and temporal — that is very personal, but at the same time shared by an entire community.
“Virtually every ‘hustler’ who made ‘hand-to-hand’ retail sales on the regular six-to twelve-hour shifts, and most caseworkers in the spatially enclaved economic niche we studied were arrested — often multiple times within a few months of being hired. The police relied on racial profiling (customers= whites/sellers= Puerto Ricans) and primarily targeted hand-to-hand sellers and customers during their frequent raids,” said Bourgois and a group of anthropologists who conducted extensive field research in North Philadelphia. The result was the article “The Violence of the American Dream in the Segregated US Inner-City Narcotics Markets of the Puerto Rican Colonial Diaspora,” published in 2021 in the book “Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets.”
Serrano’s new corner after he got out of prison was Lawrence and Indiana Streets in Fairhill. He was selling again, but this time “big,” he says, not with pride but as something real he can’t downplay. Among his clients he had a faithful one: another Puerto Rican like him who had been buying drugs from him for about five months. And as a good fellow countryman, he sat down with him to drink in a bar.
One day someone told Serrano, “I’ve seen that guy, I saw him once when I was in the federal.” It turned out that the compatriot was an undercover federal agent. Serrano quickly moved, again, from the corner. Up until March 5, 1992, when several cars surrounded him and another agent approached him and said, “Sam we were looking for you.”
El estado de Pensilvania le concedió a Serrano la eliminación de sus antecedentes penales. Foto por Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
On November 17, 1997, Serrano got out and had already decided that it was enough, that he would not set foot in prison again. He was 26 years old. All his cases had been for drugs. In the federal prison, although “controlled substances” are accessible, he managed to break his addiction.
“El que quiere cambiar, cambia. Porque hay suficiente oportunidad, hay programas que uno puede aprovecharse. En la federal yo hice muchos programas. Deja ver si lo tengo aquí”. Se pone a buscar en una gaveta de su escritorio. “Porque yo siempre guardo ‘to”. Y saca uno de sus certificados del Departamento de Corrección. También tiene un archivo grande con más documentos. Al rato saca uno que parece el más importante. Está dentro de una carpeta de tapa dura y tiene un sello grande color oro.
“He who wants to change, changes. Because there is enough opportunity, there are programs that one can take advantage of. In the federal prison I completed many programs. Let me see if I have it here.” He starts looking in a drawer in his desk. “Because I always keep everything.” And he pulls out one of his certificates from the Department of Corrections. He also has a large file with more documents. After a while he pulls out one that seems the most important. It is inside a hardcover folder and has a large gold seal.
“My case has been erased. I paid for a lawyer and in the year 2000 I went to the Supreme Court Boards of Pardon and the governor [of Pennsylvania] signed my expungement.” This way, if a policeman pulls him over for any reason, he won’t know that Serrano was incarcerated. Because for people who were imprisoned, even after completing their sentence, prison appears as a blemish that can only be erased with money.
And how did you get a job when you got out of prison and still hadn’t cleared the record? I ask.
“Easy,” he answers without hesitation. “I left on the 17th. On the 18th I was already working.” For reference, he got a job doing inventory for a company. Later he got another job in an auto repair workshop, and with the help of a brother-in-law he became certified as a mechanic, until he opened his own workshop in 2014.
But it’s not always so easy. Or not everyone has the same luck. The unemployment rate for people who were incarcerated in the United States has been 27% higher than the general unemployment rate in all historical periods, including during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a study by the Prison Policy Initiative found. This organization’s estimate establishes that people want to work when they leave prison, “but face structural barriers to securing employment, particularly within the period immediately following release.”
“For those who are Black or Hispanic — especially women — status as ‘formerly incarcerated’ reduces their employment chances even more. This perpetual labor market punishment creates a counterproductive system of release and poverty, hurting everyone involved: employers, the taxpayers, and certainly formerly incarcerated people looking to break the cycle,” according to the study.
Samuel Serrano named his business Resurrected Auto Repair. Photo by Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“Two or three times a year, I close everything up and we leave. I like to travel. About three months ago we got in my SUV and went to Kentucky. I go wherever I want. I’ve been to Mexico, Honduras, in November we went to St. Thomas, I’ve been to Jamaica,” says Serrano before going back to the workshop to work with his two employees. It’s almost noon and the customers keep coming.
Para Samuel Serrano ir a la cárcel es como desaparecer. Y sabe, por experiencia, que muchos se quedan adentro. Es puertorriqueño, dueño de un taller de mecánica en Filadelfia, Pensilvania, el estado con la mayor cantidad de personas nacidas en Puerto Rico cumpliendo sentencias en cárceles estatales.
Hay 788 personas que nacieron en Puerto Rico y están sentenciadas a pasar el resto de su vida en prisión solo en los seis estados con más población puertorriqueña, Florida, Nueva York, Pensilvania, Nueva Jersey, Massachusetts y Connecticut, según datos de entre diciembre de 2022 y febrero de 2023, encontró el Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI).
En Estados Unidos había 1.2 millones de personas encarceladas para finales de 2021. Una de cada siete está sentenciada a cadena perpetua, más de 200,000 en total, según The Sentencing Project, organización sin fines de lucro que investiga el discrimen racial en el sistema penal estadounidense.
Pensilvania es el tercer estado con mayor población boricua en Estados Unidos. Pero tiene más puertorriqueños encarcelados y sentenciados a cadena perpetua que Florida, el estado con la mayor población puertorriqueña.
En Kensington, se pueden identificar negocios con imágenes representativas de la cultura puertorriqueña. Foto por Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“Las sentencias de Pensilvania son excepcionalmente agresivas cuando se comparan con otros estados... Pensilvania tiene el segundo número más alto de personas sentenciadas a cadena perpetua sin derecho a libertad condicional en Estados Unidos”, dijo Andrea Lindsay, directora de Iniciativas Estratégicas en la Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, organización que ofrece servicios legales gratuitos a personas de bajos ingresos que tienen récord criminal.
A Serrano le tomó una fuga y dos encarcelamientos que en conjunto le quitaron casi una década de libertad, pero salió. Volvió a aparecer en el mismo barrio de donde se lo llevaron: Kensington, al norte de Filadelfia, la ciudad más grande de Pensilvania.
Ya han pasado 26 años desde que Serrano cumplió su última sentencia. Y ahora, una mañana de comienzos de verano, Serrano atiende a una clienta en su taller de mecánica, eñangotao con una linterna alumbrando debajo de un carro, al tiempo que se fuma un cigarrillo. Al terminar, se mete en una oficina que tiene en el mismo taller y se sienta detrás de un escritorio. Cuando recuerda algo, mira hacia arriba y se cruza las manos sobre el pecho. Si menciona una calle, señala al aire como indicando su dirección.
Rodeado de fotos familiares, Samuel Serrano en la oficina de su taller de mecánica. Foto por Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Las calles 5th y Glenwood hacen esquina en Fairhill, un barrio puertorriqueño del área norte de Filadelfia. Allí hay una bodega que se llama “La Familia Latina”. Y casi al lado un edificio de ladrillo aparatoso: una fábrica abandonada al borde de una vía de tren, vestigio de una era industrial desvanecida. El taller de mecánica de Serrano queda a media hora de esa esquina, en Kensington, otro barrio predominantemente boricua en esta sección de la ciudad conocida como North Philly.
“Yo soy nacido y criado aquí en Philly. La mai mía es de San Lorenzo y el pai mío es de Ponce, de Puerto Rico”, dice Serrano en español con algo de acento. Suena el teléfono y para contestar cambia a inglés: “What 's up brother? I am good…” El papá trabajaba para el Departamento de Sanidad de la ciudad y la madre trabajaba en el hogar. Emigraron desde Puerto Rico cuando tenían 20 años de edad, en la década de 1970.
Los muchachos que desaparecían de las calles y que Serrano volvía a ver cuando caía preso eran también puertorriqueños de esta zona densa de la ciudad, en donde hay jardines con estatuas de la Virgen María, flanqueada por banderas puertorriqueñas y grandes bocinas que retumban con salsa.
Una fábrica abandonada en Fairhill, en el norte de Filadelfia, recuerda la era industrial en este barrio. Foto por Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Las principales causas de encarcelamiento entre los puertorriqueños en Estados Unidos son el narcotráfico y el asesinato en primer grado.
De los 274 puertorriqueños que están sentenciados a pasar el resto de su vida en la cárcel en Pensilvania, 199 fueron sentenciados a cadena perpetua sin derecho a libertad condicional (life without parole), encontró el CPI. Y otros 75 tienen condenas de 50 años o más, algo que es catalogado como “sentencia virtualmente de por vida” por The Sentencing Project.
Entre los puertorriqueños sentenciados a cadena perpetua sin derecho a libertad condicional en Pensilvania, 192 fueron acusados de asesinato en primer grado, que es cuando se considera que la muerte de la víctima fue intencional. Y 34 fueron acusados de asesinato en segundo grado, que es cuado se considera que la muerte de la víctima no fue intencional. Pensilvania impone cadena perpetua obligada a los acusados de asesinato en segundo grado, que incluye a personas que no participaron directamente en la muerte de la víctima.
En 2021, Lindsay publicó un estudio sobre la población sentenciada a cadena perpetua, sin derecho a libertad condicional, por asesinato en segundo grado en Pensilvania. Y reveló que el 73.3% de esa población penal tenía 25 años o menos al momento de ser acusados. Además, cuatro de cada cinco eran “personas de color”, un término que en Estados Unidos se usa para englobar a toda una gama diversa de personas “no blancas”; y siete de cada 10 se identificaron como personas negras.
“Publicar estos datos es una oportunidad para pensar sobre de qué estamos hablando y de quiénes estamos hablando con estas sentencias”, dijo Lindsay en entrevista con el CPI.
La mayoría de los puertorriqueños encarcelados en el estado de Pensilvania está en State Correctional Institution, en Chester, a 35 minutos en auto desde Filadelfia. Datos del mapa ©2022 Google
Hay personas nacidas en casi todos los municipios de Puerto Rico encarceladas en Pensilvania. Algunos nombres de los pueblos de nacimiento son anotados por el Departamento de Corrección de Pensilvania con errores, como Myia West, para Mayagüez, Aponito para Aibonito, Luguillo para Luquillo, Ballamon para Bayamón, Mega Baja para Vega Baja y San Sevassta para San Sebastián.
Entre los 1,431 boricuas encarcelados en Pensilvania, 60 anotaron que su lugar legal de residencia era Puerto Rico. Los demás reportaron a Pensilvania como el lugar de residencia. Pero también hay boricuas nacidos en Puerto Rico residentes de los estados de Delaware, Nueva York, Nueva Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Kansas, California, Carolina del Norte, Rhode Island, Tennessee y Texas, cumpliendo sentencias en Pensilvania.
En los documentos que entregó el Departamento de Corrección de Pensilvania al CPI, los sentenciados tienen fechas de entrada y salida. En el caso de los sentenciados a pasar el resto de su vida en la cárcel, el encasillado de fecha de salida aparece en blanco. Otros tienen fechas de salida, como el 16 de enero del año 2172.
“Nosotros [en la cárcel] nos pasamos matando el tiempo, como quien dice, jugando baloncesto, handball, pelota. Todo el mundo se lleva bien”, dice Serrano. De nuevo habla en presente, como si no hubiera salido de allí. La pared que tiene a sus espaldas está llena de certificados, licencias y permisos enmarcados, junto a fotos de su esposa y dos hijos, uno de dos y otro de tres años. Afuera de la oficina se escucha el ruido metálico del taller, en donde trabajan dos empleados, también puertorriqueños.
“Aunque, siempre hay problemas, tú me entiendes”, sigue Serrano.
“Porque hay muchas gangas en la federal y en la estatal también. En todas las prisiones que uno va están los AB o Aryan Brotherhood [una organización neo nazi], están los mexicanos, los Latin Kings de Nueva York están ahí, siempre se encuentra uno que tenga problemas. Algunos boricuas pertenecen a los Latin Kings, pero no todo el mundo. La mayoría se pasan solos y solo quieren hacer su tiempo para irse pa’ su casa. Pero hay mucha gente ‘haciendo vida’, yo me encontré a muchos boricuas que están de por vida”, dice Serrano — quien acaba de cumplir 53 años de edad — bajando la voz, reflexivo, mirando hacia el techo.
Con las salidas, Serrano se fue memorizando el camino. El estipendio, lo fue guardando. Pasó un año y medio hasta que una noche, junto con dos amigos, abrieron una puerta, después otra: salieron a un paisaje oscuro y yerboso. Caminaron, cuenta Serrano, “por las propiedades de los blancos de allá, de los americanos”, patios verdes con grandes casas blancas de madera. Iban en dirección a la única estación de tren por donde podían escapar.
Pero allí les esperaban los guardias del centro de detención.
La única opción que les quedó fue correr por las vías. Corrieron, llegaron a otra estación. Y esperaron hasta que llegó el tren de la línea Market Frankfurt, el “L”, en dirección a Kensington, Filadelfia. Después los guardias buscaron a Serrano, “por todas partes”. Fueron varias veces a casa de su madre. Pero él vivía en la calle desde los 13 años. Cuando eso tenía 16, y nunca lo encontraron.
“Yo era malo, yo vendía drogas, fumaba, joven… Yo me metía crack, heroína, cocaína, yo me metía de to’. Y la mamá mía no podía aguantar conmigo así que me tiró pa’ fuera”.
Mapa manuscrito de Kensington en Filadelfia. Suministrado por Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
La diáspora boricua de Filadelfia se asentó en Kensington y Fairhill, al norte de Filadelfia, después de que fuera desplazada por el racismo y la gentrificación del barrio Spring Garden, durante el punto más álgido de la desindustrialización, a finales de la década de 1970. Cuando llegaron al norte de Filadelfia “eran literalmente refugiados de ese otro barrio y simultáneamente se encuentran con la otra gran migración por pobreza que viene de Puerto Rico”, cuenta el antropólogo Philippe Bourgois, profesor en la Universidad de California en Los Ángeles, en entrevista con el CPI.
Al no haber empleos en esa parte de la ciudad, devastada por la austeridad del gobierno y el cierre de fábricas, gran parte de la diáspora boricua se integró al “mercado global de narcóticos” que vino a suplantar el vacío económico de la zona, explica Bourgois.
Entre los barrios de Kensington y Fairhill, en donde se concentra la diáspora boricua de Filadelfia, opera uno de los mercados de droga más grandes de la costa este, y los índices de pobreza y de encarcelamiento son los más altos de toda la ciudad.
La bandera de Puerto Rico ondea en una propiedad en el vecindario de Kensington, en Filadelfia. Foto por Joel Cintrón Arbasetti | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
La fracasada guerra contra las drogas de Reagan seguía activa en 1988. Ese año, la ciudad de Filadelfia se encaminaba a romper su récord de asesinatos. Para el final del año serían 400. Una mañana, a eso de las seis, una decena de patrullas rodeó un bloque de Kensington. Arrestaron a alrededor de 15 personas. Una de ellas era Serrano. Tenía 18, ya era adulto, así que tendría que cumplir tres años en la cárcel estatal.
“Mi compañero de celda en la estatal era un muchacho que yo conocía desde que yo tenía 10 años, de Hunting Park [otro barrio del norte de Filadelfia]. Un boricua de esos de calle de verdad. Estaba haciendo diez años. Ahora está tranquilo remodelando casas. En cualquier cárcel que vayas vas a conocer a alguien de la calle”, dice Serrano.
El año en que Serrano fue a la cárcel, el ‘88, fueron encarcelados otros ocho puertorriqueños que siguen encarcelados en Pensilvania. Siete están sentenciados a cadena perpetua, todos por asesinato en primer grado, y uno a salir en 2036, por violación.
Esto no significa que fueron los únicos puertorriqueños que encarcelaron ese año. Porque los que ya cumplieron sus sentencias, no aparecen en las listas que entregaron al CPI los departamentos de corrección de los seis estados con más puertorriqueños.
Si Serrano estuviese todavía en la cárcel, no aparecería en esa lista tampoco. Porque solo contaron a los nacidos en Puerto Rico, el resto, los puertorriqueños nacidos en Estados Unidos como Serrano, quedaron invisibilizados entre las categorías de White, Black o Hispanic, términos amplios y ambiguos que han invisibilizado a los boricuas y el origen nacional de la gente latina desde siempre.
Serrano trabaja de lunes a sábado en su taller, en el barrio Kensington donde se crió. Foto por Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
Serrano salió de la cárcel estatal en 1992. Volvió a lo de antes, al mismo barrio de su natal Filadelfia, pero a una esquina distinta. Antes era la de las calles Hancock y Dauphin, o 5th y Glenwood. Cada detención de Serrano tiene puntos cardinales y fechas que marcan un mapa — territorial y temporal — que es muy personal, pero a la vez compartido por toda una comunidad.
“Prácticamente todos los ‘administradores’ y los ‘joseadores’ que hacían ventas [de droga] al por menor de mano a mano, en el turno regular de seis a 12 horas en el enclave espacial de este nicho económico que estudiamos, fueron arrestados, frecuentemente múltiples veces. La policía se guía por un perfil racial que consiste de la fórmula: ‘blanco [white] = cliente / puertorriqueño = vendedor’. Y durante las frecuentes redadas de la policía, el objetivo eran los vendedores directos y sus clientes”, cuenta Bourgois y un grupo de antropólogos que realizó una larga investigación de campo en el norte de Filadelfia. El resultado fue el artículo “La violencia del sueño americano, al interior de la ciudad segregada y el mercado de narcóticos de la diáspora colonial puertorriqueña”, publicado en 2021 en el libro Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets.
La nueva esquina de Serrano después de salir de la cárcel era la de las calles Lawrence e Indiana, en Fairhill. Estaba vendiendo de nuevo, pero esta vez “en grande”, dice, no con orgullo sino como algo fáctico que no puede minimizar. Entre sus clientes tenía uno fiel: otro puertorriqueño como él que por alrededor de cinco meses le estuvo comprando drogas. Y como buen compatriota, se sentaba con él a tomar en una barra.
Un día alguien le dijo a Serrano, “yo a ese tipo lo he visto, lo vi una vez cuando yo estaba en la federal”. Resultó que el compatriota era un agente federal encubierto. Rápidamente Serrano se mudó, otra vez, de esquina. Hasta que el 5 de marzo de 1992 varios carros lo rodearon y otro agente se le acercó y le dijo, “Sam we were looking for you”.
Serrano contestó que no sabía de quién hablaba, como si él no fuera él. Pero el agente, llamado James, “nunca voy a olvidar su nombre”, dice Serrano, le mandó a levantar la camisa y lo identificó por los tatuajes y una foto que le habían sacado cuando fue encarcelado por primera vez. Ese día lo arrestaron de nuevo. Pasó cinco años encarcelado bajo custodia federal.
En el momento de su segundo arresto, Serrano estaba en la calle bajo libertad condicional. Algo que se repite constantemente. Entre los más de 1,000 puertorriqueños encarcelados en Pensilvania, 68 son reincidentes que violaron su libertad condicional, según datos de marzo de 2023.
En Pensilvania, en general, la más reciente tasa de reincidencia (las personas que vuelven a ser encarceladas) era de 64%, en un período de tres años después de haber cumplido la sentencia original. De ese total, el 75% vuelve a ser encarcelado en el período de los primeros 16 meses de haber salido de la cárcel. Y se estima que uno de cada 10 arrestados por la policía es un “ex confinado del Departamento de Corrección de Pensilvania”. Un estimado que ha aumentado desde el último informe, según la agencia.
El estado de Pensilvania le concedió a Serrano la eliminación de sus antecedentes penales. Foto por Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“Yo pagué siete mil pesos, un amigo mío pagó dos mil porque tenía dos casitos, pero yo tenía muchos casos. Ahora estoy esperando por el pardon de la federal. Pero para eso tiene que firmar el presidente [de Estados Unidos]. Ya todos mis papeles están en la White House, esperando a que cuando le dé la gana al presidente me firme la moción”.
¿Y cómo conseguiste trabajo cuando saliste de la cárcel y todavía no habías limpiado el récord?, pregunto.
“Fácil”, contesta sin titubear. “Yo salí el 17. El 18 ya estaba trabajando”. Por referencia, consiguió un puesto haciendo inventario para una compañía. Después consiguió otro trabajo en un taller de mecánica, y con la ayuda de un cuñado se certificó como mecánico, hasta que en 2014 abrió su propio taller.
Pero no siempre es tan fácil. O no todo el mundo tiene la misma suerte. La tasa de desempleo para personas que estuvieron encarceladas en Estados Unidos ha sido 27% más alta que la tasa de desempleo general en todos los periodos históricos, incluyendo durante la Gran Depresión de los 1930, encontró un estudio del Prison Policy Initiative. El estimado de esta organización establece que las personas quieren trabajar cuando salen de la cárcel, “pero enfrentan barreras estructurales para asegurar el empleo, particularmente dentro del período inmediatamente posterior a la excarcelación”.
“Para aquellos que son negros o hispanos, especialmente las mujeres, el estado de ‘anteriormente encarcelado’ reduce aún más sus posibilidades de empleo. Este castigo perpetuo del mercado laboral crea un sistema contraproducente de excarcelación y pobreza que perjudica a todos los involucrados: los empleadores, los contribuyentes y a las personas anteriormente encarceladas que buscan romper el ciclo”, añade el estudio.
El estado de Pensilvania le concedió a Serrano la eliminación de sus antecedentes penales. Foto por Ryan Collard | Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
“Dos o tres veces al año tranco ‘to y nos vamos. A mí me gusta viajar. Hace como tres meses atrás nos montamos en la guagua mía y nos fuimos pa’ Kentucky. Yo voy donde quiera. Yo he ido a México, a Honduras, en noviembre fuimos a St. Thomas, he ido a Jamaica”, dice Serrano antes de volver al taller a trabajar junto a sus dos empleados. Ya es casi mediodía y los clientes siguen llegando.
The correctional classification system doesn’t have the exact number, but for the first time, the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo got a sample that allows us to look at this historically invisible population.
In the past, stepping inside meant a prison sentence. Nowadays, at least 60 people with paid tickets in hand line up to enter the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. It is September 3, a 90-degree, clear-sky Sunday afternoon. Before the summer’s Twilight Tours end, this is one of the last chances to stare at the correctional institution at sunset.
An exhibition displays in its interior. It includes objects, photos and sound recordings of the prisoners, guards and employees who lived in this immense structure, considered one of the first modern prisons in the world. Inside the corridors and archives of this prison, which was active from 1829 to 1971 in the heart of the city of Philadelphia, you can see that the Puerto Rican population imprisoned in the United States has always been invisible.
“We had this Puerto Rican guy come into Eastern State Penitentiary, and I don’t think they really knew what to do with him because they had the Blacks in certain blocks and the whites in certain blocks. I don’t ever remember any Blacks being on the same block as whites. Or the whites being on the same blocks as Blacks,” says Wilson Floy, a guard who worked at the penitentiary in the 1940s, in an audio from the exhibition.
Eight decades later, in 2023, the correctional system’s identification and classification method still makes it impossible to know how many Boricuas are incarcerated in the United States, a country where more Puerto Ricans live than in Puerto Rico.
Although state departments of Corrections collect information on the place of birth of incarcerated persons, they do not publish it as part of their reports. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans and Latinos who were born in the United States remain invisible under the categories of Black, White, Hispanic, or Other.
For about six months, the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, in Spanish) submitted information requests to the corrections departments of each of the six states with the most Puerto Ricans — Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut — to get the demographic data on the Puerto Rican population in its prisons. The response and form of delivery of each petition was different and reflects a fragmented, unequal, and deficient information collection system.
“Structurally, you’re seeing how racism operates: they try to minimize the arguments that have been made historically in terms of incarceration in the United States being a racist phenomenon by not having the information in an adequate way,” said Carmelo Campos, attorney, and professor of penology at the Colegio Universitario de San Juan.
The United States imprisons more people per capita than any democratic country in the world, according to a study by the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank focused on public policy on the penal system. And it disproportionately incarcerates certain groups, hence the importance of knowing the identities of those incarcerated, Emily Widra, a senior analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, told the CPI.
In the US Census, many Puerto Ricans identify as white or Black, or even as Latino. This, and the inadequacy of the data collected by the correctional system, hinders the ability to accurately know if Puerto Ricans are being incarcerated disproportionately compared to other groups.
For Black Americans, the incarceration rate by 2021 was five times that of white people in state prisons, according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that researches racial discrimination in the United States’ justice system and advocates for the reduction of the prison population.
The incarceration rate among Latinos or Hispanics (categories with which some Puerto Ricans identify) was more than 400 per 100,000 inhabitants, by 2020. While that of whites was less than 200, according to the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. But there is a widespread suspicion among penal rights organizations and scholars on the subject that the number of Latinos in prisons in the United States is higher than reported by government agencies
The Sentencing Project attributes it to a fair amount of inconsistency in measuring Hispanic jail and prison populations: “They are frequently counted in conflicting or contradictory methods; e.g. Hispanics measured racially as black or white and not as a distinct group.”
In the six states with the largest Puerto Rican population, there are 5,326 men and 148 women who were born in Puerto Rico and are serving sentences ranging from one year to life in a state prison, according to data from December 2022 to February 2023, the CPI found.
Pennsylvania, the state where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were signed, and home to Roberto Clemente’s baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, has the largest number of Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico serving sentences in state prisons: 1,431, as of December 2022. Of that total, 21 were women. The Puerto Rican population in Pennsylvania, the third largest in the United States, is 466,450, according to the 2021 Census Community Survey.
In a municipal jail in Philadelphia, the largest city in that state, San Juan-born Clay Pizarro, 49, experienced periods of total isolation while incarcerated awaiting his sentence. It was the year 2021 and the restrictions implemented by the COVID-19 pandemic were in force.
In November of that year, Pizarro had a hearing on his case. But instead of being transported to court, he was locked in a section of the jail that was designated for quarantine, even though he was vaccinated and tested negative for the virus. This caused his legal proceedings to be delayed for months, according to a civil rights class action lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia that was resolved in favor of the plaintiffs.
Pizarro was at Riverside Correctional Facility and feared violence because he witnessed abuse by correctional guards who used pepper spray indiscriminately, physically assaulted other inmates and failed to protect the prison population, according to the lawsuit.
In 2022, Pizarro finally entered a state prison to serve his sentence, becoming one of the 334 people born in Puerto Rico who entered Pennsylvania state prisons in that year alone. In the Corrections public database, Pizarro is identified as Black.
Down south in Florida, Ricardo González was accused of murdering a police officer in the middle of a 1992 bank robbery in Miami when he was 22. That same year he was imprisoned and in 1998 he was sentenced to death. Since then, he has appealed his sentence several times.
In one such attempt to save his life, in 2001, the defense presented the testimony of a neuropsychologist, who said that, at the time of the crime of which he was accused, González was “under extreme mental and emotional pressure because he grew up between Puerto Rico and the United States,” for not being proficient in the English language, learning problems, the need to make money and a brain injury. The state decided to uphold the death sentence against González, who appears identified as Hispanic in the official database.
In Florida, the new capital of Puerto Ricans in the United States, there were 1,144 men and 45 women who were born in Puerto Rico serving sentences in state prisons as of February 2023. Of those, five are sentenced to death, including González. Florida is the second state, after Pennsylvania, where there are more Puerto Ricans locked up.
Third is New York, with 1,002 men and 25 women who were born in Puerto Rico and are serving sentences in state prisons as of October 2022. In neighboring New Jersey, there were 435 men and 14 women, on the same date.
In February 2023, the CPI submitted a request for information on Puerto Ricans in federal prisons to the U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons. The agency responded that processing the application could take up to nine months.
The number of Puerto Ricans incarcerated in the United States that the CPI was able to collect represents only those born in Puerto Rico who are in state prisons. It does not include US-born Puerto Ricans, or people in municipal jails awaiting sentencing, or those in juvenile prisons, on probation, or in federal prisons.
Although it is an incomplete figure, the Puerto Rican population locked up in state prisons in the six states with the most Puerto Ricans is larger than the population of the municipality of Maricao in Puerto Rico, which has 4,755 residents.
From the outside, the Eastern State Penitentiary looks like a medieval fortress. It occupies about nine acres of land with 30-foot-high walls on Fairmount Avenue, a commercial street in Philadelphia where people sip coffee at outdoor tables that overlook the entrance to the former prison.
Al Capone, the quintessential gangster of the prohibition era, was in that prison in 1930. That same year, on December 4, a much nobler and totally unknown character was admitted there, a Puerto Rican seaman named Mario Pacheco, alias Tony Jerry, Mario Reyes or Margaro Pacheco.
Reyes was born in 1904 in the mountain town of Comerío. When he was sent to the Philadelphia penitentiary for the second time, in 1934, he was 31 years old. But in the criminal ID photo he looks older. Maybe because of tiredness. You can see it in his eyes, the seriousness, the air of resignation.
The ID card’s residence box says: “Prisoner has been in jail most of time since arrival in U.S.A.” And he is described as having maroon eyes, black curly hair and “swarthy complexion,” a now obsolete term that could be translated as “dark skinned.” In another document from the penitentiary, he was classified as “black.”
Pacheco, who according to the ID had a tattoo of a tombstone and the word “Mother” on his left shoulder was accused of stealing “dry goods” from a bodega in 1934. It could have been coffee, sugar, fabrics, or tobacco, but the documents do not specify the exact product, nor the amount. It took six years for him to be able to get out of prison on probation.
Manuel Fernández, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, entered the same prison in 1936, also for robbery, and left in 1944. In the 1940 penal census he was classified as “white.” Place of birth: “Porto Rico.”
In 1940, most of the people incarcerated in the penitentiary were Americans, according to the census. There was a Russian, an Italian, a Latvian, a Cuban and a Puerto Rican — Fernández. If this penitentiary were still operational today, there would be many more Latinos inside serving sentences.
From 1985 to 1995, the number of Latinos in state and federal prisons in the United States increased 219%. The trend continued until Latinos became the fastest growing group of incarcerated people in 2021. They currently make up about 15% of all people sentenced in state and federal prisons in the United States, according to The Sentencing Project.
In a courtyard outside the Eastern State Penitentiary there is a sculpture called The Big Graph. It is gray and red in color, stands more than 16 feet high and weighs 3,500 pounds. It’s a giant bar graph depicting the expansion of the US prison system over the past 40 years, labeled “historical in scale.” Those columns, drawn against the sky like a city that has grown quickly, condense a history of institutional racism and the criminalization of poverty.
For more than a century, the United States imprisoned between 100 and 200 people for every 100,000 inhabitants. That began to change starting in 1970. New laws and longer sentences began to dramatically increase the prison population, to the point where by 2014 close to 700 people were incarcerated for every 100,000 inhabitants.
The crime rate has gone up and down over the years and is largely independent of the incarceration rate, the Pennsylvania penitentiary exhibit explains. This implies that the uptick in the number of people in prison is not related to an upsurge in crime, but rather to a system that has become increasingly punitive.
The growth of what scholars call the “carceral state” has gone hand in hand with the “Law and Order” discourse, launched in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in ‘68, and reinvigorated in the ‘80s under the presidency of Ronald Regan.
In his 1994 book, “El día menos pensado: Historia de los presidiarios en Puerto Rico,” historian Fernando Picó says that “prison is not the solution. It’s the problem. Eliminating prisons should be a public priority.”
In the United States, the massive prison expansion in the last decades has few defenders. But reforms to reduce the number of people incarcerated have been minimal, too, says Marie Gottschalk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a criminal justice specialist, in her book “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.”
One of the reforms that should be implemented to shrink the size of the correctional population, in addition to expanding good behavior bonuses and probation for age or medical reasons, is to have a better data collection system, said Widra, of the Prison Policy Initiative.
“You know, departments of Corrections could do that so easily without a governor telling them, without a law passing, they could just collect better data…if we knew what was going on in prisons 100% of the time and who the affected people were… Well, I think people wouldn’t be as willing to send people to prison.”
