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JAMAICA: Young Offenders Caught Up in Adult System

Kathy Barrett

KINGSTON, Feb 23 2010 (IPS) - For years, Jamaica’s correctional system has been under the glare of the international spotlight.

Concerns have been expressed time and again by rights groups here and abroad about conditions in the prisons and police station lockups, as well as juveniles who are being housed alongside adult offenders.

Last year, seven teenage girls died in a fire at a juvenile correctional centre, and just three weeks ago, 40 prisoners and nine warders were injured in an uprising at a maximum security prison that also held 33 juvenile offenders, both male and female.

Altogether, 80 juveniles – 71 boys and nine girls between the ages of 13 and 17 – are currently housed in detention centres across the island while they wait for their cases to be heard in court.

“This is illegal,” said children’s advocate Mary Clarke. “While the numbers fluctuate on a daily basis, too many by far are children being held for extended periods without a court hearing. Children on remand should be in remand centres and not lock-ups, and should be separated from children who have received correctional orders, since in our law we are innocent until proven guilty.”

The Child Care and Protection Law states that young offenders should not be held for more than 48 hours – 24 hours ideally – before receiving a court hearing and being transferred to an approved facility.

Clarke pointed to several factors that contribute to the lengthy stay behind bars – up to a year for some juvenile detainees.

“This should never be allowed, but the trial process, sometimes it’s very long. Many are remanded and they are sent back to the lock-ups until the case is finished. Ideally, they should be sent to a juvenile facility, but there is limited space and lack of capacity. So children are still being kept in lock-ups while they await their court outcomes,” Clarke said.

And cases concerning juveniles continue to increase.

Data from the Department of Correctional Services shows that in 2008, 226 children were admitted into juvenile institutions for a wide range of criminal offences. The majority – 218 – were males between ages 15 and 17 years old.

The alarming number of juvenile offences has prompted a full-scale investigation by the Office of the Children’s Advocate (OCA) into the infringement of their basic rights.

The situation in Jamaica is not unique. A 2003 World Bank report found that adolescents 13 to 19 years old were responsible for a quarter of major crimes worldwide, including armed robbery, assault, rape and murder, with males being the main perpetrators.

The alarming situation did not escape Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, who conclude a nine-day visit to the island Sunday.

Nowak and other officials came to investigate reports of cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment in correctional, juvenile facilities and remand centres. This notably included the St. Andrew Juvenile Centre for Boys on the outskirts of the capital, where Nowak cited a disturbing system of repression and regular corporal punishment.

“The boys in remand were never allowed to leave the buildings, depriving them of any recreational activities in the open air,” he said.

In general, police lock-ups across the island were “characterised by overcrowded and filthy cells infested with rats, cockroaches and lice, and an unbearable stench……many cells were in complete darkness, resembling caves and with poor ventilation …. the time detainees were allowed outside of their cells, including toilet use, was extremely limited,” Nowak said.

He said that while torture, in the classic sense of the word, is not rampant in Jamaica, the government needs to ratify the U.N. Convention Against Torture and other cruel, degrading treatment or punishment. He also said torture must be criminalised under domestic laws.

His visit came only weeks after the uprising at the Horizon Adult Remand centre. According to Nowak, the authorities at the institution got an early warning that an uprising was in the making.

“We spoke to persons who said we anticipated what would happen, we sent a letter to the Superintendent to tell him that the conditions had deteriorated to an extent that they might explode and it just exploded and the reaction of the prison administration and the police was to send in the military, police and prison warders. We concluded that they used excessive force in beating up the detainees,” Nowak said.

Dr. Derrick Pounder, the medical expert with the U.N. team, detailed the injuries of those who returned to the remand centre following the incident.

“They uniformly had head injuries from multiple blows to the head. Some had been knocked unconscious and didn’t recover consciousness until they got to the hospitals. But the most telling of the injuries were the pattern, what we would call defensive injuries, injuries inflicted when a person tried to protect themselves from harm,” Dr. Pounder said.

He added that the marks correspond with pipes that were ripped from the walls of the remand centre by prisoners during the incident. Pounder said the detainees allege that these pipes were used on them by the police and soldiers.

The Jamaican government has yet to respond to Nowak’s findings.

According to Clarke, the juvenile detainees witnessed the Feb. 9 riot, although they were in separate cell blocks from those housing hardened adult prisoners. She said social workers have been counseling the children to help them deal with the trauma of their experience.

During his visit, the U.N. Rapporteur reiterated the call from local human rights groups for children to be removed from adult correctional facilities, stating that international standards are being violated.

However, plans to transfer the youthful offenders have been delayed by the government’s financial woes. Children’s’ Advocate Clarke said that plans to relocate 250 juveniles to a new facility in the western parish of St. James are now on indefinite hold.

Clarke also complained that the system continues to fail the juveniles in state care and called for a half-way house to keep juveniles who have no family, until they are adults. Of primary concern, she said, is the case of a teen-aged girl who is still being held because there is nowhere else to place her.

Seven months after June Spencer Jarrett created history bybecoming the first woman appointed to head Jamaica’s correctional system, the local human rights lobby group, Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), is calling for her removal.

Their call followed a report from the commission of enquiry into a fire last year that claimed the lives of seven teenage girls who were being held at the Armadale Juvenile Correctional Centre in the northern parish of St. Ann, which has since been closed by order of the prime minister.

The report strongly criticised the department of Correctional Services for failing to put adequate measures in place to prevent the fire, believed to have been started by some of the rebellious teens.

The JFJ says this amounts to dereliction of duty on the part of senior officials from the department of correctional services.

But despite all of the investigations and calls for action voiced over the years, human rights lawyer O. Hilare Sobers says the problem is unlikely to be seriously addressed anytime soon.

“Jamaica’s correctional/custodial system has never been a priority for successive governments, nor for that matter, the people of Jamaica,” he said. “(I) don’t think Jamaicans have ever had any collective shame over the state of the correctional/custodial system, and don’t think they are about to grow a conscience over it in a hurry.”