FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Set in a wasteland of derelict buildings and furrowed alleys, the Kingtom Remand Home for young lawbreakers here was itself a dilapidated mess, until British donors renovated it in November. Now it boasts a new roof, freshly plastered walls, refurbished dorms and a coat of Kelly-green paint — all in all, a refuge far better than Freetown’s mean streets.
Yet the new Kingtom houses all of four teenage inmates. Fourteen others escaped in October, mostly, the home’s matron said, because there was not enough food. Nobody stopped them because the sole guard was on his deathbed. No one was called to replace him.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, where 350 million young people often subsist amid poverty, orphanhood and separation from their parents, running afoul of the law is a fact of life. So are places like the Kingtom Remand Home.
Juvenile justice here is, in almost every sense, an oxymoron. This region’s nations endorse international norms for fairness and humanity, employ dedicated staff members and benefit from foreign donations, yet Africa’s juvenile-justice systems routinely, almost blithely, deliver injustice and brutality instead.
In even a cursory review of child justice in Sierra Leone and three other African nations, a visitor found children locked up with adult criminals in a medieval prison; others recounted their weeks in police-station pens barely bigger than closets. Children languished in rehabilitation centers with little food, few beds, no activities, not even electricity. Some have stayed well beyond their sentences, simply because there is no money to send them home.
One child said he had been locked naked in a cell for three days with five adults who beat him and took his food; another was in his fourth year in an adult prison, awaiting trial, without ever seeing a judge.
Boys faced years in detention for offenses as minor as stealing a phone or having sex with a girlfriend. Girls bought protection from the law by giving themselves to corrupt policemen. Again and again, children said they had been beaten and robbed by police officers who arrested them, jailers who imprisoned them or inmates who shared their cells.
Most African nations have embraced the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, including some of its rules for treating child offenders, and many have enacted or drafted laws to make its provisions binding. But across the continent, child justice problems compete against malnutrition, AIDS and illiteracy for money and attention. Juvenile justice, raw though it may be, is often a second- or third-tier issue.
“A lot of these countries are trying to constitute children’s rights, but when you look at their resources, it just blows you away,” said Louise Ehlers, a juvenile-justice expert for the Open Society Foundation in South Africa, Africa’s most advanced nation on the issue. “In places like Zambia, you can’t even start talking about the things we’re talking about here. There’s no electricity; no vehicle to get a child from point A to point B; no facilities for children awaiting trial.”
Many nations face a fundamental problem: millions of children lack birth certificates. Children nearing legal adulthood, usually age 17, are difficult to tell from adults, while adult offenders often claim to be juveniles. Hardened by such deception, officials often regard all but obvious children as adults, and treat them accordingly.
Reforms also face a cultural divide. The global child rights standards adopted by African parliaments trickle down sluggishly to villages, where the concept of children’s rights can be a curiosity. Harsh discipline frequently is the norm. In Sierra Leone, more than one in five children recently surveyed by Unicef said they had experienced severe physical punishment at home.
Public sentiment also weighs heavily on juvenile-justice efforts. With violent crime endemic and voters inflamed, legislators in South Africa, for instance, are loath to change laws that treat minors like adults for serious crimes like murder and rape.
Little Money and No Luck
Ambrose, a 17-year-old with hooded eyes, hails from Mpigi, west of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. He is detained in the Naguru Remand Home in Kampala, a complex of brick halls, their windows shrouded in wire mesh, built in 1954 for 45 inmates. On this day, it holds 98.
The crime he is accused of — and which he denies — is having sex with his employer’s 16-year-old daughter. Underage sex is called defilement here, and 36 of Naguru’s 86 boys, ages 12 to 17, face defilement charges. The penalty, in theory, is death.
The boys’ greatest offense, however, is being unlucky. Defilement frequently amounts to blackmail. A boy who pays a girl’s parents for violating her virginity almost always goes free; one who cannot often faces prosecution, even if the girl was a willing partner. Girls cannot be similarly charged.
Ambrose could not produce 70,000 shillings, or $40, to mollify the girl’s parents. He has not gone to trial, and already he has paid a heavy penalty.
“I spent two weeks in a police cell,” he said. “I was beaten. I was forced to make statements which I wasn’t willing to make. I was being forced to accept that I really defiled that girl.”
That was last December. Ambrose has spent a year behind Naguru’s wire mesh waiting for a trial, even though Uganda law limits such pretrial detentions to six months. The reason is that capital charges must be heard by Uganda’s High Court — and the High Court docket is swamped.
“Over 50 percent of cases heard by the high court are defilement cases,” said Richard Buteera, Uganda’s director of public prosecutions. “Cases come in from all over the country.” For defilement trials, some children wait two years. The High Court is short of money to assemble lawyers, witnesses and evidence for hearings. The remand home’s deficits are even more basic.
“We have no fuel,” said Rose Etit, a social worker at Naguru. “Now two weeks we are not going to court, almost three, and they are escaping. They climb on the roof and they jump the fence.”
Africa’s child-justice failures may be pervasive but that does not make them exclusive. “The issue is universal,” said Geert Cappelaere, Unicef’s Sierra Leone director and a scholar of juvenile justice in 60 nations. “You may have in a few countries a situation that’s apparently worse — overcrowded, no beds, no facilities. But from the perspective of the kids, that doesn’t make much of a difference.”
Indeed, African nations sometimes hew closer to United Nations standards than do parts of the United States.
Sierra Leone, among the world’s least developed nations, bars children under age 10 from being held responsible for a crime; in Uganda, the minimum is 12, the age urged by the United Nations. In some American states, it is as low as 6. Similarly, 31 African nations prohibit sentencing juveniles to life without parole, as the United Nations convention dictates. In the United States, 27 states mandate life sentences for juveniles who commit selected crimes.
After a guard at the Kingtom Remand Home beat a young inmate to death two years ago, hiding his body in a plastic bag, Sierra Leone promised widespread changes. But while the government has a justice plan and support from British donors, there is no one at the Justice Ministry responsible for juvenile justice.
At the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs — an agency for five million people — the annual budget is $250,000. Child-justice spending is a sliver of that. There are few social workers, few probation officers, few lawyers and few judges — fewer still trained in children’s rights.
“How can you have law students or proper judges trained,” Mr. Cappelaere of Unicef asked, “if you don’t have a proper law program in your university?”
Other African nations are also troubled. In Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, about 60 children await trial in a stifling antediluvian dorm of the main prison, their cots and mats arranged as far as possible from the open privy. In Mozambique, only 3 of 60 inmates in the juvenile-detention section — a dorm in the national prison — have been tried.
Uganda is by comparison middle class. But its National Rehabilitation Center suffers similar ills: sporadic water, two years without electrical power for the girls’ dorm, no furniture, no job training and little to eat. Government food deliveries are hit or miss, and the center feeds inmates fortified meal from the World Food Program.
“They escape when there is no food,” said Orin Nsereko, the center’s program manager. “When there is food,” she added wryly, “it’s very hard for them to escape.”
Boys Among Men
Saidu, a 14-year-old with the oversize eyes of a younger child, is one of the four boys who did not flee the Kingtom home in Freetown, though he had reason. Saidu is a murderer.
His is a cautionary tale of what happens even when most of the system’s protections for children — defense lawyers, a separate juvenile court and a probation officer — are in place.
The victim was 15. He argued with Saidu at a theater, then beat him up to the mocking chants of onlookers. Humiliated, Saidu ran home, found a knife and returned. As his tormentor whipped him with a belt, Saidu said, he shoved the knife into the boy’s chest.
Once, such children would have been sent to Pademba Road Prison, a malevolent 60-year-old Freetown dungeon. But there, the toilets are plastic buckets, the holding cells are foul and the howling crush of prisoners seems, at times, to verge on riot. The government has barred juveniles from its cells.
So Saidu was sent to Kingtom. On a recent steamy morning, he was taken to Magistrate Bankole Shyllon, Sierra Leone’s only juvenile-court judge, to be arraigned.
“I understand the facilities at Kingtom home are not what they should be, and there have been several escapes,” the prosecutor said. “I would be very concerned if we had another.”
Prohibition or not, he said, Saidu should be sent to Pademba Road.
Saidu’s lawyer — a rarity, hired by his parents — protested. Any boy imprisoned there must be shielded from adult inmates, he argued.
Magistrate Shyllon was not convinced. “I would not advise them where to put their own offenders,” he said.
“I will send him to Pademba Road,” he added. “Hopefully, they will see that he is a child.”
Saidu dropped to his seat, sobbing. He went to the prison that afternoon.
The next day, Ibrahim Jawara, a probation officer for the Ministry of Social Welfare, pleaded Saidu’s case before Pademba Road’s officer in charge.
“He’s 14 years old,” Mr. Jawara said. “Are you supposed to keep him with hardened criminals?”
“No,” said the officer, clearly pained. “But we have 960 prisoners here in a facility that was built for 324. We don’t have the facilities.”
Saidu was far from the only child in Pademba Road. At a visitor’s request, prison guards assembled perhaps 80 inmates who claimed to be underage. Some clearly were not, but others were indisputably youngsters: Alphajallnoh, a 14-year-old sentenced to 18 months for theft; James, 14, doing four months for stealing a cellphone; and Alhaji, 14, who seemed uncertain of his offense, but complained of having to fend for himself against older, stronger inmates.
“I don’t have anybody to fight for me,” he said.
Saidu was jailed in Cell 2, perhaps 8 feet by 10 feet. His cellmates were a bank-fraud artist and a convicted murderer. The murderer, Joseph Bellon, 27, seemed most concerned about him.
“He didn’t eat any food last night,” Mr. Bellon said. “He’s really traumatized,” he added. “He’s a young boy.”
In an interview, Magistrate Shyllon said he had studied justice in Canada and Britain. He knows, he said, how Western critics view sending a 14-year-old to such a prison.
“This is Sierra Leone,” he said. “Nobody spoke about human rights in England in the 1970s, when they were putting people in overcrowded prisons. Do you want me to leave an alleged aggravated burglary to be out of prison because cells are overcrowded? Let him be overcrowded. But solve the overcrowding.”
Although the child rights legislation in some countries, like Uganda, is a model for the continent, the justice system matches its ideals only sporadically, wherever fortune has placed money, a caring government official or, perhaps, a program by a children’s charity. Seldom do the fates converge.
That, say experts like Mr. Cappelaere, is the problem. Western-style justice systems are supposed to deliver equal and humane treatment but often get bogged down in Africa by cost and complexity. Many juvenile offenses might be better handled by traditional justice practices, which focus less on punishment than on apologies and compensation for victims, some experts argue.
Traditional justice is not ideal: a child rapist, for instance, might expiate his sin by marrying his victim and paying a dowry to her parents. The best system, experts say, would blend Western human rights values with traditional resolutions.
But such systems could take decades to establish. For now, the focus is on plugging the holes in the existing ones.
In Lira, Uganda, the state prison has set aside a dorm for boys — spartan, but freshly painted and clean. Amid Africa’s often-brutal prisons, it is an island of civility.
It is only an island. Among the dorm’s 60 or so boys is Otim, an orphan accused of murdering a 23-year-old man. Otim is 17. The murder occurred in 2002, when he was 13. He said he had been in prison since then. He has yet to see a lawyer.
Otim claims he was framed by his uncle, who coveted the 12-acre plot Otim’s parents left him. “I think I will be free because there’s nothing wrong I have done,” he said. But, he added: “I am still waiting to be tried. I don’t know why I have not been tried.”
Neither do his jailers.
“Well, that’s a problem for the government, really,” said the prison’s duty officer. “There’s nothing we can say about that.”