Activists push for juvenile jails reforms

Thursday, September 17, 2009
By By Jan Khaskheli

Karachi

Civil society organisations working for the protection of children’s rights have urged the government to establish ‘Youthful Offenders Industrial Schools’ in jails across the province so as to ensure that juvenile inmates are provided with adequate therapy and turned into reformed citizens, The News has learnt.

Abdullah Khoso, provincial manager of Juvenile Justice Sindh - a subordinate body of Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) - told The News that jails should be turned into institutions to educate children, so that they come out as conscientious citizens when they are released instead of people reverting back to crime.

Narrating his experiences from a week-long visit to police stations and juvenile wards in northern Sindh, Khoso said that these wards were in deplorable conditions, while police officers were ignorant of juvenile laws. He said that in the absence of such facilities in northern Sindh, hundreds of juvenile prisoners become hardened criminals or turn into victims of physical and sexual abuse.

He claimed to have met 22 juveniles inmates at the juvenile ward in Khairpur Jail, where almost all children were suffering from skin allergy. Children complained that they were neither provided with medicines and proper treatment by jail authorities, nor have they been given safe drinking water. Instead, the children maintained, they were being compelled to use brackish water in prison.

Khoso said that the Sindh Prisons inspector general (IG), Sindh Police IG, Minister for Prisons as well as the Sindh Home Department have to take efficient and quality measures to improve the behaviour of police officers towards the child offenders as well as to the condition of the prisons.

While talking about the meeting he held with the Khaipur Jail deputy superintendent (DS), Khoso said that the DS told him that they had sent requests to the Home Department for installing pipelines to provide safe drinking water to juveniles. However, they were waiting to receive a response. He further added that the conditions at Larkana and Jacobabad jails’ juvenile wards were pathetic, and that the jail staff did not allow civil society members to visit and help improve ward conditions.

Khoso and his team also visited more than a dozen police stations in Khairpur and Sukkur districts, where the officials concerned had no knowledge of Juvenile Justice System Ordinance-2000, Sindh Children Act 1955 or of any other laws related to children’s rights. Similarly, the law stating that the probation officer had to be informed immediately after the arrest of any child was not in their knowledge.

Members of the civil society organisations working on children rights alleged that while higher authorities including the district police officer (DPO) had given due weightage to children’s cases, but the lower rank police staff only cared about their own vested interests.

Civil society members also said that the Sukkur DPO and Khairpur DPO have established Child Rights Desks (CRDs) at their respective headquarters, which will help to protect children from any abuse and ensure that children attain all legal rights whenever they come in conflict with the law. Unfortunately however, the performance of these CRDs has been reported to be unsatisfactory because of the scant interest shown by administrators. Civil society organisations have demanded proper monitoring of CRDs by the DPO, and the implementation of laws to protect the rights of children, especially the juveniles in prisons.

Members of the organisations said that in the past jails were institutions educating and rehabilitating prisoners to become reformed citizens, but that now they had become nurseries to help crime thrive.

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