The bill of rights for young offenders. What has happened since 1986?

The following is the speech I gave at the Second International Conference on the Rights of children in trouble with the law that was held in Brussels on October 24, 2006

In September, 1980 when I attended the Sixth Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders held in Caracas and presented my paper on the need for a bill of rights for young offenders, the United States delegation agreed with my proposal and the next day they brought forth a resolution asking the delegates to instruct the United Nations Secretariat to conduct world-wide meetings for the following five years to draft up such a standard. In 1985, the propose bill of rights, called the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules) was discussed at length at the Seventh Congress held in Milan and accepted and finally approved and passed by the U.N. General Assembly in January 1986.

The Rules were to have an effect on millions upon millions of children around the world, children in need of protection from abuse in our justice and correctional systems. To the children in trouble with the law in many of the signatories to the convention, the Rules were a godsend.

Alas, some signatories have since 1986, ignored some of the various rights that were to be afforded to these unfortunate children. It is the purpose of this paper to give descriptions of some of the abuses that was heaped upon some of these young offenders who were supposed to be protected under the auspices of these Rules.

In 1980, my main complaint that prompted me to suggest the creation of a bill of rights for young offenders was about problems related to government correctional facilities housing young offenders. A quarter of a century later, there are still problems in young offender correctional facilities and this is still my main complaint. Section 13.5 of the Rules states that “while in custody, juveniles shall receive care, protection and all necessary individual assistance----social, educational, vocational, psychological, medical and physical----that they may require in view of their age, sex and personality.”

What follows are some of the horror stories that have come to light of what has occurred inside some of these young offenders facilities for boys and girls in one particular continent alone.

Established by both law and policy, the institutions were supposed to rehabilitate and treat children charged with misdeeds ranging from refusing to attend school to homicide.

A 48-page report made public in 2003 by investigators in one country painted a bleak picture of the privately run institutions as debilitating dumping grounds for troubled children. Woefully underfinanced, understaffed and ill-equipped, the institutions and their poorly trained workers doled out a volatile mix of physical and verbal abuse and in some institutions, mandatory Bible study, but at the same time, they withheld basic medical care and a decent education — all in violation of the Covenant that country signed with the United Nations.

Investigators who descended on the institutions four times in 2003 found ample evidence to declare that children as young as 10 were being mistreated.
Here are some examples of the mistreatment those children were subjected to.
Boys and girls were routinely hogtied and placed in dark cells, shackled to poles or locked in restraint chairs for hours for minor infractions such as talking in the cafeteria or not saying "Yes” or “No, sir."

Girls were made to run while carrying tires and boys while carrying logs, sometimes to the point of vomiting and they were often forced to eat their own vomit.
Boys and girls were also choked, slapped, beaten and attacked with pepper spray as a form of punishment.

Girls at a training school for girls who misbehaved or were on suicide watch were stripped naked and left in a windowless, stifling cinder-block cell, with nothing but the concrete floor to sleep on and a hole in the floor for a toilet, for several days and sometimes even a week at a time. One girl had been locked in a bare cell while naked for 114 straight days.

The ‘Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice’ clearly states that young offenders who are in correctional facilities should be properly medically cared for and yet there are some young offender facilities where this edict was not being adhered to.

The acting head nurse at the aforementioned training school ignored children's injuries and illnesses, refused to help girls fainting from heat and she even blocked children from having access to the visiting doctor. The nurse at another boy’s training school was seen immunizing two children for Hepatitis B with the same needle. Dental care was nonexistent, and the dental clinic at that training school was a mess of mouse droppings, dead roaches and long-expired medicines.

A 16-year-old boy in one of the young offender training camps should have been in a hospital instead of doing construction work and then being forced to do pushups. The boy collapsed with a severe lung infection at the camp for delinquents.

After doing construction in the morning, he was assigned to leaf cleanup. When he balked, staffers ordered him to do calisthenics. When he refused again, they put him in an isolation barracks. When he fought back, they placed him in a ''control position.'' When he defecated on himself, they carried him to a shower. When he would not get dressed, they put clothes on him and helped him do more calisthenics. At one point, the staff helped the boy do push-ups by grabbing his belt and pulling him up and down. Shortly after that, the boy died.

At the time of his death, the boy’s lungs were filled with pus - the byproduct of pneumonia, bronchitis and strep and staph infections. He had been sick with empyema, an accumulation of pus in the lining between his left lung and chest cavity, which had been reducing the elasticity in his left lung for weeks. Finally, after that hellish day at the institution, his heart stopped beating for lack of oxygen. That privately run young offender’s facility was closed down.

When the court sent a fifteen-year-old boy to another young offender’s facility in March 2003 after a string of burglaries, he hoped to get treatment for his bipolar disorder, which relatives say arose from sexual abuse he suffered at age 3. But in letters to his father, the boy was soon begging to be transferred to a state mental hospital.

Despite the fact that he was to be given psychiatric treatment, he had only been visited by a therapist for two minutes. He had been given his punishment but denied what he needed most----psychiatric treatment.

Though mentally ill and retarded children belong elsewhere, 66 to 85 percent of the training schools' students were found to have mental disorders and 9 percent were suicidal. Yet psychiatrists spent an average of just one day a month on campus, mainly performing court evaluations and not treating patients. Individual staff members handled as many as 30 children each, allowing for little of the personal attention as required by law. New students at some institutions were kept out of classes for three to five weeks, violating compulsory attendance laws. They were routinely pulled from class for work details, and those in isolation got sporadic instruction or none at all.

In the year 2001, there was an investigation into the death of a 14-year-old boy at a desert boot camp for troubled youth. He was dehydrated delirious and forced to eat mud by his counselor. Other campers told of abusive treatment they said they had suffered at the hands of staff members who were not much older than the children they were supervising. Children at the camp were punched, kicked, handcuffed and forced to swallow mud regularly. The younger campers were often made to ingest dirt that turned to mud after staff members poured water into their mouths. They said they were allowed to wear only black sweat pants and sweatshirts in temperatures that regularly exceeded 37 degrees Celsius and were physically abused for asking for food, water or medical attention. That privately run camp was shut down also.

The 14-year-old boy was one of many children to die in a series of incidents in recent years at so-called wilderness therapy camps for young people in which rugged conditions and tough discipline are used to break antisocial and, in many cases, criminal habits. Many of the camps were not regulated by government authorities but were run by private organizations.

At one such camp, on one occasion, all the campers were told to lie on their backs alongside one another after which the teenage staff members wearing boots, ran across their chests. Complaints, the boys said, were answered with physical punishment. They would make the boys stand up at attention, and if they moved they'd punch the boys in their stomachs. In one instance, the campers were made to place rocks along a trail and if the boys didn't do it right, the teenage staff members would stomp on the boy’s arms. In one instance, a boy’s arm was broken as a result of being stomped on. The boys said they were frightened of the man in charge of the camp. It was alleged that he once held a knife to the throat of an older boy who wanted to quit the program.

In one training school, the girls were repeatedly pepper-sprayed while running up and down a hill 125 times. If a girl stopped to catch her breath, the staff member nearest her would pepper spray her in her face.

In many of these privately run young offender facilities, there was no real supervision and as such, the young inmates were often brutalized by stronger inmates.

The stupidity and brutality, is not entirely in the domain of privately run juvenile correctional facilities. In one government institution in a large Canadian city, a sixteen-year-old boy was constantly teased by other inmates and made to eat his own vomit off the floor. He had had enough and after he was locked in his cell, he wrapped a bed sheet around his neck and hanged himself with the other end of the bed sheet tied to a metal bar at the top of his bunk

It was here that the real stupidity of the staff ran amok. The guard, who walked by and saw him hanging, wasn’t able to cut the dying boy down because he had been forbidden to carry a knife when doing his rounds.

He reached for his radio and finding it missing, he left the youth hanging by his neck and walked to a control station at the end of the range to summon help. He not only walked to the control centre to avoid panic but stopped on the way back to put three youths who were in an open area back into their cells — a process that involved unlocking and then relocking the cells. When he finally got back to the victim’s cell, the boy was near death.

The prison nurse who after being informed that the boy was hanging by his neck, neglected to bring any resuscitation equipment with her and had to return to the health station for it, and another officer who arrived at the cell could not cut the youth down because he too did not have with him the C-shaped knife used for such emergencies.

This mentally ill youth, who was awaiting trial on charges of stealing cheques from relatives, managed to end his life on Oct. 1, 2002 while under a suicide watch-----he died hours later after he was rushed to a hospital.

The stupidity of the staff occurred that night despite the fact that at least five other inmates in that correctional facility had earlier attempted to hang themselves using sheets.

The 130-bed detention centre for 16- and 17-year-old youths awaiting trial had previously been condemned by that province’s child advocate as being chaotic and unsafe. It too was finally closed down.

Experts say there is little mystery about how the facilities for young offenders reached such a state. Public concern for treating juvenile offenders had waned, as had the attention of child-advocacy groups, to battles considered already won. Legislators had repeatedly cut financing for the young offender facilities saying the need for more funding wasn’t there.

Some countries are filling their juvenile halls and training schools with children guilty of lesser offenses — either to justify the costs of new detention centers, or because no other option exists. Many of the poorest countries have no group homes or short-term treatment centers for young offenders. They end up using training schools as a catch basin for all the child and youth problems in their countries.
Experts on juvenile justice say that what was happening in those training schools was by no means rare. There are many young offender facilities that all had their horror stories.

If the treatment of young offenders in the United States and Canada; two countries that love freedom and their children, is so shabby in some of their young offender correctional facilities, imagine if you will what happens to imprisoned young offenders in third world countries where those countries don’t have the money to build suitable facilities and train staff on how to treat their young charges.
Nevertheless there are ways we can improve the lot of these most unfortunate children.

First, get rid of the privately operated young offender facilities or alternatively, have more state control over them. It seems that this is where most of the abuse lies.

Second, each facility should have a committee of concerned citizens called “visitors” inspecting the facilities. A Young Offender Facility Visitor Program should be set up for each young offender facility so that well meaning and respected persons, such as judges, criminologists, social workers, psychologists, retired nurses, retired correctional officials and perhaps even sports or entertainment personalities can visit these correctional facilities regularly and talk with young offenders on a one-to-one basis who wish to express their concerns about their wellbeing to the Young Offender Facility ‘visitor’ who is interviewing them. This would be especially helpful for those
incarcerated young offenders who don’t have visits from family members,
relatives or friends of the family.

Hong Kong has such a program. It works for them. In certain parts of India, they have a Prison Visiting System which acts as a potential tool for prison reforms. It works for them also. If these visitor programs can work in these countries, it should work elsewhere.

Canada used to have grand juries inspecting prisons but that concept ended years ago. Now imprisoned citizens can write their provincial ombudsman if they have a complaint. That works for adults but it is highly unlikely that young children will avail themselves of that opportunity to express their grievances. This is why this writer believes that a Prison Visiting Program is a more appropriate way of resolving the problem of child abuse in young offender facilities.

Recently, Amnesty International aired a complaint on television in which they described the abuses heaped upon young children in Nicaragua who were kept in custody for months in police cells.

The question that comes to the fore is; who is responsible for these crimes against these young offenders?

The answer, to some degree can be found, ironically enough, from the words of one of the most horrible human beings that ever inhabited this world. His statement however that he made at his trial is so applicable in situations like what took place in the institutions I have just written about. His name was Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz. He said in part;

“This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centres, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people and later by the prisoners who were freed, were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies and men who laid violent hands on the detainees.” unquote

Hosse wasn’t hanged because of the individual violence committed on the prisoners by his underlings but because he supervised the extermination of his prisoners. But his reference to his guards and others committing brutal assaults on his prisoners is so apt when considering what has been done to the young offenders in the institutions that I have written about. The senior staff in those institutions were indifferent to the plight of the young offenders just as Hosse was indifferent to the plight of his prisoners.

It is my belief that the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Administration of Juvenile Justice should be amended by including references to privately run young offender correctional facilities and police cells.
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Dr. Dahn Batchelor is a Canadian criminologist and practices criminal law as an court advocate and has addressed United Nations Congresses in Geneva (1975) Caracas (1980) Milan (1985) Cairo (1995) Vienna (2000) and Bangkok, (2005) He was a supervisor in a young offender’s correctional facility in Canada in the mid 1950s. His email address is dahnbatchelor@rogers.com