Our Blog Has Moved

We have moved our blog to http://childreninprison.tumblr.com/

Please join us to see our lateset updates....

Sara's Story - homeless teen in prison gets second chance

Comunidad para Mujeres girls's prison

Sara* was living on the streets, sometimes with different friends, moving from place to place, when she was arrested by the Mexico City police. She was arrested for petty robbery. Sara, like all kids arrested in Mexico City, was first taken to the police detention for juveniles, Agency 57. After three days she was moved to the pretrial detention facility, Comunidad para Mujeres [Women's Community].

Matching Donations - 40 / 25 Challenge

Our board of directors is putting out a challenge - 40/25. 40 new donors to IJC’s Children in Prison Project, each giving $25 or more, by June 15th, and the board will match it. 

All donations go to support the Children in Prison Project in Mexico. Our current projects include: working with judges to create a pretrial release program in Mexico City, equipping a group home to care for homeless kids coming out of prison, and consulting with various state governments on the need for pretrial release alternatives. As a new non-profit, we need to get the word out about our important work with kids in detention in Mexico. If you have already donated to IJC, send this to your friends and family, and ask them to donate just $25. 

Click Here to Donate Now

Children's Day in Mexico - Don't Forget the Invisible Children

(ESPAÑOL) Today is Día del Niño or Children’s Day in Mexico. Around the city there will be parties, free rides at the fairs for children, even free McDonald’s hamburgers. I am sure that my daughter will come home from her school party with a large bag of candy to rival the Halloween spoils of children in the United States.

Mexico City Reforms its Juvenile Justice System

The Mexico City Assembly passed a new Juvenile Justice Law (Ley de Justicia para Adolescentes) last week. The new law creates an integrated adversarial system for all crimes. This will replace the existing hybrid system where "non-grave" crimes were tried in a semi-adversarial system with oral trials but "grave" crimes were tried under Mexico's traditional inquisitorial system. The differences between the adversarial system and inquisitorial system are significant. The inquisitorial system in Mexico is an off-shoot of a Spanish-style written system, where prosecutors file written briefs and written evidence, the defense gives written responses and the judge makes written rulings. Each step of the process is painful and drawn-out. The adversarial system uses oral hearings where lawyers state their cases orally, the judge responds and provides a ruling at the end of the hearing.

Spring Break in Prison

Visiting Day at adult prison in Mexico City

This week in Spring Break in Mexico. Kids actually have two weeks off from school for spring break. But don't worry, school goes until July14th.

As we are finishing up our work for the week and planning to get out of Mexico City for a few days, it got me thinking about what spring break is like for kids in prison.

Homeless and In Prison - Losing all Hope

I had the great pleasure of meeting with Casa Alianza- Mexico today. They gave me a tour a two of their five youth homes for homeless teenagers in Mexico City. It was an amazing experience. Casa Alianza, known as Covenant House in the US and Canada, is an organization that works with homeless teenagers through North and Central America. They have been in Mexico City for 26 years! There is an amazing amount of overlap between the homeless youth population and children in prison.

Excessive juvenile detention worsening Mexico's security problems?

There has been a lot written about Mexico's security problems. The drug war has led to tens of thousands of deaths. Certain municipalities, cities and large parts of some states are very dangerous places, where narco-gangs operate with impunity. We have met many families who have moved from more dangerous parts of the country to start life over in Mexico City - internally displaced people.

As a result of the insecurity, political pressure to get "tough on crime" has led to very draconian juvenile justice laws. Many states in Mexico allow kids to be imprisoned for one year or more while awaiting trial. Some states have excessive penalties juveniles, as high as 20 year sentences in some cases.

Is juvenile justice policy actually contributing to the security problems?

Criminal justice reforms and legal education - creating a juvenilejustice clinic

In recent weeks I have been exploring the possibility of working with Mexican universities to create a juvenile justice law clinic. There are a few public and private law schools in Mexico City that have clinical programs, but none work with juveniles in prison. But the universities that I have spoken I with are very excited about the possibility.

Is anyone paying attention?

I became interested in juvenile justice, at least partly, because it seemed to be a forgotten and overlooked area for many. The problem of kids in prison was never the "flavor of the day" for human rights activists at my university. Even my first project in Bolivia with Save the Children was part of a side-project that Save had just started with kids in detention, and then shortly after I left ended the project.

With Mexico's ongoing criminal justice reforms, it would seem like fertile ground to be advocating for reforms to the juvenile justice system. Both the Mexican and US federal governments have been pouring resources into the criminal justice system reforms for years now. Mexican and US universities, and non-governmental organizations have been researching and advocating for reforms that recognize prisoners' rights. But among all of these efforts, very little has been directed towards juvenile justice reform.

Why is this? It is partly a question of expertise. Many criminal justice reform organizations state that they don't have the expertise in juvenile. Children's rights organizations don't have criminal justice expertise. It is also partly it is a question of resources and numbers. There are limited resources and organizations want to reach the largest number of people or reform the largest systems. So, prison reform and criminal justice reform focuses on adults because there are more. Whereas children's rights organizations focus on education and health because they impact more children.

But I believe that in reality reforms to the juvenile justice system impact a much greater number of kids than is immediately clear. Because juveniles can only be in the juvenile justice system until 18, those that re-offend are often over 18. Thus, the failure to respond to juvenile crime proportionally, excessive detention and the lack of community-based treatment and reintegration programs, means that the juvenile justice system is contributing to an over-burdened adult system.  Kids who are failed by the juvenile system re-offend as adults.

Furthermore, the problems that children's rights advocate are trying to address - lack of education, health and nutrition, even the lack of registering birth certificates - are all more acute for juveniles in conflict with the law. Many of these kids come from the most at-risk communities.

It is unfortunate that both among non-governmental organizations and the government, that juvenile justice is an afterthought. The ripple-effects from the failures of the juvenile justice system are impacting both criminal justice reform efforts and efforts to improve the situation of at-risk children. We need these communities to engage on juvenile justice reforms.

Justice reform is more than good intentions...

Bolivia imprisons 16 and 17 year old juveniles in adult prisons. Bolivia's prison system has some of the worst conditions in Latin America and the world. When I visited San Pedro prison, an infamous men's prison in the center of La Paz, Bolivia, I was genuinely scared and anxious to get out as soon as possible. I took a short tour of the facility, a converted convent that was at 200% of capacity. My college and I had chosen a visiting day to meet with the prison social worker and psychologist, so when we were ready to leave we had to fight the crowd at the front gate and get the guard's attention so he would pick us out of the mass of prisoners.

Considering the deplorable conditions of the adult prisons in Bolivia, it was no wonder that a Brazilian NGO had dedicated resources to build a modern facility outside of La Paz to house the juveniles that were being detained in San Pedro. The new facility was centered around treatment and rehabilitation. They had hired a full staff of social workers, psychologists, and prison officials. They had obtained all of the government permissions required. The building was built and ready to go. Except for one thing. It was completely empty of juveniles. 

The reason: only 12 of the 200 juveniles in San Pedro had been sentenced. The rest were awaiting trial and the judges would not approve their transfer. How do you rehabilitate somebody who has never been convicted? 

When I talked with the NGO in Bolivia I was not surprised. I had already finished my research for Save the Children and discovered that at least two-thirds of the juvenile prison population was awaiting trial in Bolivia. Many people talked about the deplorable prison conditions and the overcrowding - government officials, human rights advocates and NGOs. But the reality is that many of the problems in the prison system are a result of problems in the justice system. The justice system is broken and is simply sending too many people to prison for too long, often without even sentencing them. Its like a leaky dam causing a river to flood and blaming the river banks. What are the prison officials to do?

The Children in Prison Project is dedicated to creating systematic reforms to the juvenile justice system. In order to be effective, our projects have to be based on solid research and a holistic understanding of the justice system as it exists.  Justice reforms have to be more than just good intentions.

Read our research on the Mexico City juvenile justice system.

Kids For Cash and the International Crisis

"Kids for Cash" is a new documentary just coming out that follows the corruption in the juvenile justice system in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. A juvenile court judge would get kids accused of crimes and their parents to waive their right to an attorney and then send them to a private detention center. The owners of the detention center then gave the judge kick-backs for each kid. I all $2.6 million in kick-backs and 3000 kids were involved. The documentary follows some of the specific stories of kids whose lives were ruined by detention, mostly kids who had committed non-violent, petty offenses.

When I first found out about the Kids for Cash scandal I was living in Bolivia working with Save the Children on a project in detention. What was an anomaly in the US and "rocked the nation" (according to the movie poster) was common practice in Bolivia. Kids who were arrested for any manner of crime (sometimes just failing to pay off the police) would sit in prison. If they were under 16 years old they would be trapped for 180 days. If they were older, 18 months. These were kids who had never been convicted of any crime, and most never would be. Two-thirds of the juveniles in Bolivia's prisons are "awaiting trial" or in "preventative detention". The reality is that the trial never comes for for most. The law limits the time in preventative detention to 180 days or 18 months, depending on age. After the time limit, most kids are released and the prosecutors don't bother following up. The only exception is if the victim or victim's family bribes the police and prosecutor to investigate and bring a case to trial.

The "Kids for Cash" shows how prison can destroy young lives. But the same thing is happening all over the world, kids are thrown into prison with serious criminals, often times adults too. They leave months or years later broken.  Kids for Cash-type corruption is occurring all over the world.  Corrupt systems that trap kids in prison.

Lying About Getting Coffee... Laying the Groundwork

Because the Children in Prison Project is new, I have been spending a lot of time "laying the groundwork" for future projects. Or insert your favorite business euphemism, "networking", stumbleupon, or try this one. What it really means is that I send out a lot of emails, make a lot of phone calls and then count the days until I think it is not rude to email again or call again until I get response. When I am lucky enough to make contact, I usually ask for a meeting over "coffee", which is a white lie, as I am a total caffeine addict and can't touch real coffee.

The truth is that I have had some meetings that will be very important for our future work - with Mexican NGOs, government officials in the federal or local government, even the US and Canadian Embassies (these are great examples of networking as "stumbleupon" networking as my wife's photography clients were the ones to put me in contact with people at the embassies).

In fact, a very promising project I am developing is a partnership with corporations' corporate social responsibility programs to raise funds to get more kids out of prison and into alternative programs. We are still developing the proposal, but I am trying to partner corporations with local Mexican NGOs that work with kids on release programs in order to increase their capacity to take in more kids. We may even be able to provide legal defense to some of these kids. I can't get more specific yet.

So in between emails and un-returned calls, exciting things are happening. February and March promise to bring more of the same, so stay tuned...


Consider supporting us with a small gift: http://internationaljusticeconsulting.org/donations.html

The Children in Prison Project Launch Video

Click Here to Watch Now.

Please share, Like, email, etc. 

For more information or to donate go to www.internationaljusticeconsulting.org.

Children in Prison in Sierra Leone

I ran across an organization working with juveniles in prison in Sierra Leone called Free Minor Africa. It was started by a photo journalist, Fernando Moleres. Anybody interested in juvenile justice and the excessive use of pretrial detention should check out their website.

The images from the Moving Walls exhibit are amazing and heart-breaking.

© Fernando Moleres http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/moving-walls/20/juveniles-waiting-justice