Focus on boys behind bars

Sitting in a prison cell at the tender age of 13, all Nasir can think about is when he will be able to live a normal life again. Caught carrying drugs from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the capital, Islamabad, neither having been previously told what he was carrying, nor having questioned it. Like many children in this impoverished nation of 140 million people, he had just taken the money he desperately needed. Looking back, Nasir said he would never have done it had he known what the consequences would be. Now, cut off from the outside world, he has been in jail awaiting trial for the past two years. According to recent findings by a Pakistani NGO, Women’s Aid Trust (WAT), hundreds of children in the country are being imprisoned every year for carrying drugs from city to city, with many unaware of the consequences they face if caught. Tricked into committing the crime due to extreme poverty, they end up languishing in jail for years on end before a trial takes place, due to an increasingly slow legal system. “These are the most crucial years in a person’s life, and these children, a lot of whom are innocent victims, are spending them behind bars,” WAT volunteer, Shaheena Khan told IRIN. Although primarily working for women’s rights, WAT has taken on the task of assisting juveniles at the Adiala prison in Islamabad’s twin city of Rawalpindi. At least half the children in Adiala were caught carrying drugs, a proportion similar to other prisons in Pakistan, according to Khan. She maintained that the government was well aware of the desperate situation the children are in, but had failed to enact adequate legislation to protect them, thereby condemning them to spending years in jail. “It is ludicrous to blame the child for this act,” she argued. “It is clear who is behind this, but even the police turn a blind eye,” she added. Khan said the police in Pakistan were so poorly paid that they would accept bribes from drug barons to keep quiet and let the children take the punishment. “It is cruel and heartless,” she said. She asserted that the children - all uneducated boys - should not be in prison in the first place. The children, as young as eight years of age, are paid a maximum of US $15 to carry drugs such as hashish and heroin, from the NWFP into other provinces. Around 17 million Pakistanis earn less than a dollar a day, so the payment represents a small fortune to many youngsters. Drug barons transported supplies from Afghanistan over the border, and then employed children to do their dirty work in Pakistan, Khan said. One child was found to be carrying up to 12 kg of hashish. Most boys in Adiala were caught by police on their way into the western Punjab Province, usually at checkpoints in Attock or Taxila, halfway between the NWFP and the Punjab. With an estimated 4,000 children in jails across the country, accused of various crimes, but mainly drug carrying, conditions inside are said to be dire. The situation is particularly bleak in the NWFP and the southern Sindh Province. According to statistics from the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), a Pakistani NGO, some 92 children are detained in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, 647 in Sindh, 723 in NWFP and 2,524 in the Punjab Province. At least a quarter of offenders in Peshawar jail are children, detained mainly for smuggling drugs. Most of children are from broken homes, uneducated and struggling to survive. They have often lost one or both parents, and were being looked after by a relative. “These boys are all alone. They need love and attention,” Khan maintained. Although the traditional family system to some extent stops children from getting involved in such crimes, Khan said there had been an increase in boys carrying drugs in the last two years. “A few years ago, 50 percent of women in the same jail were behind bars because they were carrying drugs. But the trend has changed now and drug barons are using children instead,” she said. Meanwhile, Islamabad stands firm on the issue. “If a child violates the law then he or she will be punished according to the law,” additional secretary at Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior, Abdul Rashid Khan told IRIN. “They know exactly what they are carrying - why would anyone pay them to carry a package unless it contained something like drugs?”. The official said the government granted remissions on jail sentences on special occasions such as independence day, if juveniles had served a third of the sentence, except in cases of murder, rape, terrorism and kidnapping. WAT has been working with juveniles for more than a year, and in that time only two of the boys have been convicted, and workers say they have managed to get many others released. However, Khan said it was a very lengthy process, and that getting a child out of jail could take up to 18 months. Once incarcerated, the state gives the child absolutely no developmental support. “The child’s progress is hindered - he is stuck in jail, and there is nothing he can do,” Khan explained. In response to this, WAT has started an education programme at the Adiala jail, offering courses in tailoring, electronics and basic education. But the prison is overcrowded, housing 300 boys, and the courses offered by WAT can only cater for 100. WAT has also been trying to improve hygiene levels inside the building by providing the youngsters with their daily needs, such as clean clothes and soap. The jail itself has a capacity of 2,000 but has 5,000 inmates, who cannot be catered for properly. According to Khan, Adiala is a fairly modern jail and the situation was far worse in other parts of the country. “There are very, very few cases of child abuse in this jail, as there are NGOs working inside the jail, but the situation in the Sindh Province and Baluchistan is much worse.” Living conditions, she said, were appalling, with children in some jails taking it in turns to sleep, as there was not enough space. “The ironic thing is that these children come from even worse conditions than they are living in at the jail. This shows how desperate they are to earn that small amount of money,” she said. Most of the children cannot afford to hire lawyers, so WAT also provides free legal aid and alerts the children to their rights. “We identified 60 children last week that needed legal help.” Khan explained that there were also some boys who had not even committed a crime, but had been thrown into jail because the police wanted to show they were catching a large number of criminals on a daily basis. Khan told the story of a 12 year-old boy who had come to the Punjab Province from the southwestern city of Quetta. He was picked up off the street by police and thrown into Adiala jail. “The boy had committed no crime, where is the justice in that?” she exclaimed. “The police just want to show their superiors that they have a tight hold on the situation. It’s most likely that the boy would have no financial or legal support and therefore no voice,” she added. WAT is also planning a rehabilitation programme for the boys once they are out of jail. “They need at least shelter to give them a good start in life,” Khan said. One of the main reasons why so many children are thrown into jail in Pakistan is the early age at which a person has criminal responsibility. At the moment it stands at seven. “This is far too young,” Anees Jilani, legal expert at SPARC told IRIN. In most western countries the age was between 12 and 14, he added. However, the government argues that a court can dismiss a case if the child in question is aged between seven and 12, and it is felt that he or she was led astray through vulnerability. Jilani stressed there was an urgent need for children’s prisons due to the problem of sexual abuse in prisons. “Children are kept in jails from the age of about eight or nine to the age of 21, even though the law says a person is no longer a child after the age of 18,” he said. Officials at the interior ministry said they realised there was a need for separate jails, but lack of funding stood in the way. But it is not just drug-related crimes the children are embroiled in. Although not as common as drug smuggling, there are many children who stand accused of murder. At present 20 percent of children in Adiala are awaiting trial on charges of murder. “This is a tricky situation,” Khan said. In most cases children are told by family members to commit a murder, usually in revenge for a family killing, she explained. According to WAT, this type of practice is more common in rural parts of Pakistan where education is low. “These boys are not taught the difference between what is right and what is wrong, so we stress morals through our education programme at Adiala jail,” she said. In an attempt to protect children, the government of General Pervez Musharraf introduced a new law last year. The Juvenile Justice System Ordinance (Number XXII), prevents the death penalty from being imposed on children and gives them the right to legal assistance at the expense of the state. The law also states that the child’s guardians must be notified straight away when a child has been arrested. However, the provinces of Baluchistan and the NWFP have largely ignored laws that deal with juvenile offenders, while the Punjab and Sindh have only partially enforced them. While the ordinance extends over the whole of Pakistan, it does not apply to the tribal areas, northern areas and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. “The law is inadequate, and is not implemented properly,” Jilani said. “It is a complete violation of children’s rights,” he added. In the meantime, Khan said there was an urgent need for more NGOs to be working with juvenile offenders. “We cannot do this alone, we need help too,” she said. “These boys are enthusiastic, intelligent and are full of life and ambition, but they will get dragged into depression if they stay behind bars.”