By the way
By Max V. Soliven
The Philippine Star August 12, 2005
The disgraceful treatment of child prisoners, including street kids picked up for sniffing "rugby" (Sus, when this old journalist was a police reporter that was already the "drug" of the completely poor), has been exposed for all the world to see.
For more than a year, we’ve been complaining about kids arrested for petty crimes (like pickpocketing, bag snatching, etc.) being thrown in crowded, dirty, smelly prison cells along with hardened criminals and outright pedophiles. A couple of months ago, this writer reminded GMA herself at a private dinner in Makati that our prisons are horrible, and how children and young teenagers were being slapped into prison cubicles with adult convicts, including killers and rapists. I urged that something ought to be done about our awful, congested, degrading prisons.
Again, earlier this week, I wrote in this corner about our prisons of which, even the President had remarked, "living in them is worse than death." In the column, I reiterated like a nag that young kids were being confined with brutal criminals – and would, if they survived, emerge with rage in their hearts against society.
Now, we’re discovering that bad publicity for our country may be also worse than death. Cable News Network (CNN) has been televising globally, for the past two days, hideous scenes of children in prison, hopelessly packed in disgusting cells with out-and-out pedophiles (one of those vermin leeringly bragging about his practice into the TV camera).
The vivid scenes, both pathetic and revolting, bring into clear focus the bestial way in which children are treated when arrested. The conditions are bestial, it must be said, for the grown-up thugs as well – but it’s obvious that they’re in a position to prey on the children and street kids locked in with them.
The broadcaster, an ITN reporter, screwed up his nose in repulsion at the smelly, heat-suffocating conditions. The exposé was, indeed, an ITN (International Television News) report screened worldwide by CNN.
The ITN, whose headquarters is in England, reportedly even handed a tape over, in protest, to our Embassy in London before airing the report.
Remember that movie classic, Midnight Express which depicted the plight of American teenagers arrested by police in Istanbul and heartlessly dumped into the medieval and sadistic hellhole of a Turkish prison? That terrible "image" haunted Turkey for years, even though the motion picture had been made something like 20 years ago!
If you caught those pathetic images on CNN Tuesday night and Wednesday, televised repeatedly by the way, you’d be reminded of Midnight Express. Pictures, alas, speak louder than 10,000 words. What the newsreel revealed is the cruel and barbaric way our authorities treat child "suspects," not even convicted ones – while they’re awaiting slowpoke trial. This is not indifference, it’s contempt.
The excuse always being trotted out for not improving prison conditions and building better penitentiaries, not to mention non-existent holding areas for so-called juvenile delinquents, is "lack of funds."
What we really suffer from is lack of humanity.
