Corpses, the suspected victims of violent deaths, are wrapped in plastic bags or covered loosely in stained sheets. There is no air conditioning and the room quickly becomes sweltering as the tropical sun beats down on the metal roof. A black fly buzzes around the room amid the smell of decay.
A Jamaican forensic pathologist and his sweating assistants can merely shrug at the primitive conditions.
“What can I say? The lack of resources is definitely a challenge,” S.N. Prasad Kadiyala said as he waited for police officers to show up so he could start autopsies on a recent morning inside a hospital complex on the edge of the Jamaican capital.
Jamaica has had one of the highest homicide rates in the world for years, but its capacity to deal with the wave of killings has not kept pace.
The island has not had a national morgue since the 1970s, despite widespread agreement that autopsies are often performed in facilities so inadequate that investigations are placed in jeopardy, said Hayden Baldwin, who has worked as forensic consultant to Jamaica’s police force.
“I have never seen such deplorable conditions and lack of support from a government to resolve these issues,” said Baldwin, a retired Illinois state police officer and director of Forensic Enterprises Inc of Orland Park, Illinois.
In a report on global homicides released earlier this year, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime listed Jamaica as having the world’s sixth-highest homicide rate. About a decade ago, it had the highest. The island of 2.7 million people has seen more than 1,000 killings every year since 2004, mostly in slums far from the beach resorts.
Relatively few murders are solved. The conviction rate for homicides is 5 percent, according to a US Department of State report last year.
Jamaica has steadily improved some aspects of its forensic investigations, including securing more specialized microscopes to evaluate ballistics, but officials say the cost of building a morgue must be considered against competing budget demands.
Under a system revamped several years ago, just over a dozen private funeral homes around the island have government contracts to collect and store corpses awaiting autopsies. Several mortuaries also provide space and equipment several times a week for the country’s three forensic pathologists.
Pathologists and some morticians say the funeral homes are paid so little at just US$6 to US$10 per body per day for storage that they have little interest in keeping the corpses at the correct temperature because of the high cost of energy, which is about five times the cost in much of the US.
Activists and some politicians say officials could resolve the protracted problem if they wanted.
“Whatever the government really wants to do, they usually find the money. What we lack is the political will to get this done, because it mostly impacts on poor, disenfranchised people,” human rights activist Yvonne McCalla Sobers said.
The country’s health ministry declined to comment.
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