Kids in Prison

The Human Rights Magazine, Just Right, in its latest edition has the regular column of Father Shay Cullen. In this issue, Kids in Prison, Fr. Shay describes the Philippine situation and what can be done to help.  

Kids in Prison

'When I was in prison...'

Shay Cullen describes the day he met God in prison - in the shape of little Rosy staring from the bars of her Filipino prison...

Little has changed in the Philippine prison system since that day several years ago when I found a little six year old, named Rosy, behind prison bars clutching a drink can and crying her heart out for her mother. A dozen or so other street children were sprawling on the hard concrete floor, unconscious with exhaustion and hunger.

The toxic fumes they inhaled from a plastic bag of industrial glue taken from them when the local police rounded them up, knocked out some. The cheap drug was their only remedy for the constant pangs of an empty stomach. Rosy was too young for that. She had been taken from her mother who was a street vendor selling peanuts to the tourists. She was expected to turn over her earnings to get her child released. It was a case of curb-side extortion of the cruelest kind.

These were the children of God robbed of their dignity and rights and a stark reminder of the words of Jesus Christ when he told us that when we see them we see him and whatever we do to them we do to Him. That night behind prison bars I met God abused and abandoned. There in them, the God of the oppressed, the persecuted, and the innocent, cried for freedom and love. It is the fate of thousands of children today, a fate Jesus willingly shared to remind us of our dignity, to tell us who we really are.

I was filled with anger and frustration as I worked to have those children released and brought to the children’s home I had set up in Olongapo City. Today there is an estimated 20,000 children imprisoned in the Philippines. The prisons I know, having been jailed myself, such as the National Penitentiary of Bilibid south of the capital Manila, are hellholes of abuse and neglect for children as young as 9.

In some city jails the young girls are brought in from the streets to be sexually abused by the guards and the adult male prisoners for a price.  In prison, sexual assault on young boys is all too common. Some are turned into child prostitutes while others are physically abused - leaving scars and psychological wounds on them all. It is a brutal experience that can lead to a cycle of abuse and violence that fills the streets with young juveniles in constant conflict with the law.

Some never get that far. One young teenager, Raul, was an altar boy in Olongapo when he was falsely accused and jailed without charges at the request of the more influential accuser. After months of detention without trial he escaped during a jailbreak. He was quickly tracked down in a nearby squatter settlement surrounded by police and executed with a shot to the head. Official revenge was quick, brutal and without mercy. 

When some do get back to the precarious life of the streets they are constant targets for the police hit squads who seem to have a mandate to remove 'pests and vermin', as the young street kids are so frequently called by the wealthy elite. These merciless merchants care more for profits and personal protection than for the plight of the homeless and the hopeless.

Street kids who I came to know told me how they were frequently jailed and made into prison slaves working for the guards. They were forced to clean filthy buckets of excrement, massage the guards and prisoners and were sexually abused. Their friends outside worked hard carrying loads around the market, selling plastic bags and washing cars. They then pooled their earnings and paid off the police to get their friend out of jail. Payoff is the only way to freedom for these throwaway children of the streets.

Children’s Rights organizations in the Philippines are lobbying the Senate to pass a juvenile justice bill that would give young people in conflict with the law a chance of justice and recovery.  There are few juvenile detention centers in the Philippines and little sympathy for impoverished and abandoned youngsters behind bars. The compassion of Jesus is far from the hearts of those that rule the land and control the wealth.

The imprisoned children are the victims of poverty and slum life unimaginable for its hardship and toll on young lives. This is the result of corruption and inequality. They suffer sub-human conditions in prison while wealthy pedophile prisoners, such as a convicted congressman, have transformed their section of the prison into a luxury apartment with a quilted bed and air-conditioned rooms equipped with television, videos and modern appliances. Outside, where the children cannot go, a new tennis court provides the sporting pleasures to which this congressman is accustomed. A restaurant he had built delivers rich food for him and his frequent guests. Indeed it is a microcosm of the world outside where a tiny minority possesses and controls the majority of the national wealth to buy the power that will keep them far from the crowded cells of the National Penitentiary. 

No such luck for the thousands of underage kids sentenced to a prison life of abuse and danger. Many have been sentenced without an adequate defense. Life terms and even death sentences are handed down when there is no one to find a birth certificate to prove the youngsters’ real age or find evidence of innocence.   There are five minors on death row and few social workers or human rights lawyers to help them or the estimated twenty thousand children still behind bars.

The call of Christ is for us to release the innocent, protect the children, do justice and love one another. Too few are listening and the plight of imprisoned children is enough evidence to tell us that the wrong people are behind bars. END

E-mail: preda@info.com.ph

Shay Cullen is a missionary priest from Ireland, recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work protecting children in the Philippines since 1969. As a writer and journalist, social commentator and convention speaker he promotes social justice and Christian values.  He is the founder and President of the Preda Foundation, an organization working to empower the poor, protect abused children, campaign for human rights and end the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children.

Personal Testimony

In Davao City, in the Southern Philippines, in 1999 three street kids, frequent detainees of the police who had no evidence to charge them and whom human rights workers had frequently got out of the jail, were killed by gunmen. Armed men on motorcycles equipped with handheld radios surrounded them on a city street.  They pulled automatic handguns and a hail of gunfire ended the young lives of these children abandoned by all but a few brave Christians who are they threatened and harassed themselves. Another was tied in a sack and thrown into the ocean by the same death squad to suffer a horrible death. Miraculously he managed to do a Houdini-like escape and survived the shroud of death.