''I come to see my son and he's soaked,'' said Catalina Reyes, mother of a 24-year-old man jailed for credit card fraud. ``This prison needs a lot of work, a lot of changes.''

After 104 inmates died here last month in one of Honduras' worst prison fires in memory, this nation's penitentiaries were rudely shoved into the glare of an unwanted spotlight.

But while human rights advocates have for decades condemned Honduras for its deplorable prison conditions and a justice system that keeps suspects in jail for years without a trial, the Central American nation is not alone.


SAME PROBLEMS
Prisons in most of Latin America and the Caribbean are crowded, poorly managed and dreadfully maintained, say experts who track prisons and inmate treatment in the region.

''It's a very grave situation,'' said Elías Carranza, the director of the United Nations' Costa Rica-based Latin American Institute for Crime Prevention and the Treatment of Offenders.

A few years ago, Carranza declared that prisons in Latin America were ticking time bombs. Days after the deadly prison fire here, he told The Herald the situation in prisons in most of the Americas had only worsened since then.

''Where there should be 100 inmates there are 200,'' he said in a telephone interview from Costa Rica.

Carranza's report from two years ago -- the most recent available -- show that Honduras operates one of the most crowded prison systems in the Western Hemisphere.

According to Carranza, in 1999 Honduras had a capacity for 5,235 prison inmates but actually had 10,938 inmates, more than twice as many as it could handle. Honduran prison system officials say today they have a capacity for 9,080 inmates in 24 penitentiaries that hold 11,236 men and women.

According to Carranza, prison overcrowding in Caribbean and Latin American penitentiaries has increased as crime grows, more people are jailed, judicial systems churn slowly, and corrupt or cash-strapped governments do little to rehabilitate offenders.

His most recent report, released in November 2002, notes that prisons in almost all of the region's nations are crowded -- to critical levels in 19 nations. Honduras is on the critical list.

OLD AND OLDER
While the fire-struck prison here is 51 years old, another penitentiary in Juticalpa, 105 miles northeast of the capital city of Tegucigalpa, is 136 years old. Built in 1868, little has been done to modernize the adobe, wood and tile prison.

Similarly, the prison here in San Pedro Sula is in bad shape. Inside the compound of high, broken walls, inmates are jammed into barracks divided into rooms. The main entrance to each barrack has iron bars that are locked at night. During the day the inmates are allowed to roam the compound.

The prison was built to house 800 inmates but held more than 2,000 at the time of the fire on the early morning of May 17.

It also had too many inmates' televisions, radios and other electronics, which investigators say overloaded the electrical system and sparked the deadly blaze in a barrack that held 187 inmates, all alleged members of violent street gangs.

''A month before the fire at the prison in San Pedro Sula, I expressed concern about the overcrowding,'' said subcommissioner Ramón Yánez, head of the Honduran prison system. ``If we don't do anything we're going to have even more problems with our penitentiary system. The problem is serious.''

CALLS FOR REFORMS
The fire renewed calls for reforms of the prison and judicial systems in Honduras, but officials say the San Pedro Sula complex should be demolished. Plans are to replace it with a new prison that will be built 25 miles away, but Ilsa Díaz Zelaya, governor of the surrounding Cortés province, said groundbreaking is at least three to four months away.

But Honduras needs more than just one new prison.

Its prison department has an annual budget of $8.1 million, the equivalent of about $721 for each of its 11,236 inmates. In contrast, Florida has an annual corrections budget of $1.7 billion for 79,144 inmates, or about $21,480 per inmate.

Honduras has 1,272 prison guards, but when shifts, vacations, sicknesses and guards out accompanying inmates to hospitals are taken into account, the reality is only roughly 500 guards are working at any given time, Yánez said. The guards earn $220 a month, working 36 hour on and 12 off.

Even after the fire, when scores of prisoners were transfered to other facilities or released, the San Pedro Sula prison is still critically crowded with more than 1,700 inmates.

''There are just too many people in so little space,'' Marvin Merlo, 26, serving time for robbery, told a Herald reporter who toured the facility last month. ``And there are no rehabilitation programs because there are no jobs.''

Yánez acknowledged that more than 70 percent of Honduras' prison inmates are awaiting trials.

''Some spend many years in jail before they have a trial,'' he said.

``Our justice system needs to be overhauled.''