NORC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Impact evaluation of USAID Haiti PROJUSTICE program pretrial detention component
Since its creation in 2009, USAID's rule of law program in Haiti, PROJUSTICE, has worked to enhance justice delivery as a basis for establishing stability and security and improving citizens' confidence in Haitian government institutions.
Slough, Tara|Fariss, Christopher · 2017
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Abstract
One activity of this program has been the provision of legal assistance in order to reduce the rate of prolonged pre-trial detention (PTD) in Haitian prisons. Prolonged PTD constitutes a prevalent human rights abuse in Haiti: over 70% of individuals in Haitian prisons are held in this illegal form of detention. This impact evaluation seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of PROJUSTICE's legal assistance program in prisons in Port au Prince and Croix des Bouquets. Given the large populations of pre-trial detainees in these jurisdictions, PROJUSTICE legal assistants will be unable to provide assistance to all detainees before the expiration of the program in 2016. By randomizing the order in which legal assistance is provided to current pre-trial detainees, we will be able to estimate the causal impact of PROJUSTICE legal assistance on the trajectory of the cases of those subjects held in prolonged PTD and quantify the impact of legal assistance on rates of PTD in Haiti. We also intend to track a number of secondary outcomes through baseline and endline surveys. Overall, the results from this impact evaluation will be of interest to local stake holders in civil society and the government, such as the Ministry of Justice and the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSPJ), in addition to the academic community and the many human rights advocate, monitoring groups, and NGOs that work on similar issues of justice internationally. (Author abstract)
