30115: Durban (pub): Wash Post on Haiti Child Prison Population (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com> posts today's front page story from
the Washington Post...

Haiti's Lost Boys
Port-au-Prince Prison Reflects Overwhelming Problems Facing Country's
Children

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 3, 2007;

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- In a small, walled courtyard ringed by coiled
razor wire, a scrappy little boy punched and kicked at the humid air.

Mackenzy Sonson strutted one moment, cowered the next. Acted like a big
man, then slipped into baby talk.

"I'm not tough," he said on a recent afternoon. Then he smacked a kid
twice his size.

Mackenzy, better known as "Little Baron," lives in Cell C-4, back wall,
bottom bunk, at Fort Dimanche, Port-au-Prince's children's prison.
Cellmates dubbed him Baron because his dark black skin reminds them of
Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit who is believed to guard passage to the
underworld. The "little" is obvious -- he says he's 8 years old.

This place where Little Baron is growing up, where he discovered Donald
Duck cartoons and is learning to read, is a gallery of Haiti's woes.
The boys warehoused at Fort Dimanche are the products of poverty, child
abandonment, rampant homelessness and an educational system that has
failed to enroll 1 million school-age children. Their plight reflects a
country overwhelmed by the problems of its young -- more than 200,000
Haitian children have lost one or both parents to AIDS and 300,000 work
as unpaid domestic servants in a system of bonded servitude, according
to the U.N. Children's Fund.

Hardly any of the 120 boys at Fort Dimanche know when -- or if -- they
will be released. Some were undoubtedly recruited to be child soldiers
in gangs that lured them with food and shelter in return for help in
kidnappings and robberies. Others are imprisoned here for years for
minor crimes or are innocents nabbed in neighborhood sweeps by a
notoriously corrupt police force, children's advocates say.

"This is where you see the total failure of the justice system," said
Maryse Penette-Kedar, head of PRODEV, a foundation that is trying to
improve conditions in the children's jail. "It's incompetence. It's
total lack of management. People can't be in jail forever."

Haiti's dysfunctional criminal justice system offers no formal process
for freeing child inmates, Penette-Kedar said. Those who have been
formally charged are often accused of crimes as vague as "associating
with bad people."

Some of the inmates of this hillside prison were as young as 6 when
they arrived, although determining their true ages is an inexact
science. The street kids who show up at the prison in Haiti generally
come without birth certificates or parents; some don't even know their
birthdays.

Penette-Kedar's organization -- backed in part by money from pop star
Wyclef Jean's charitable foundation, Yele Haiti -- has begun a unique
transformation of Fort Dimanche, hoping to make it Haiti's first child
rehabilitation center. Young inmates who were once kept in lockdown 23
hours a day now get regular exercise and attend classes inside the
prison.

Fort Dimanche, which means "Sunday Fort," sits on a craggy hillside in
Delmas 33, a neighborhood of tightly packed cinder-block homes. The
one-story children's wing, housing inmates up to age 17, is just steps
away from a larger building where adult offenders are kept. There is
always a line of visitors for the adult prison, but few come to see the
children, most of whom are abandoned or orphaned.

The prison, for all its deprivations, can be a refuge from a hostile
environment. Children have asked not to be released, Penette-Kedar
said. A few parents have begged officials to imprison their children,
even when they have not been accused of a crime, because they believe
Fort Dimanche is safer than the streets. Several children were murdered
by gang members shortly after being released because of suspicions that
they gained their freedom by becoming informants.

But releases are few at Fort Dimanche, and a relentless stream of
youngsters flows into the prison, the loud clang of metal gates
signaling the beginning of an ordeal with no foreseeable end.

Little Baron's path to Fort Dimanche began on Port-au-Prince's airport
road, where street children live amid the stench of rotting mountains
of garbage. Like countless Haitian children, he was pushed into the
streets by parents who couldn't afford to raise him, he says. By age 5,
he was sleeping in the rusted carcasses of burned cars and picking
through garbage heaps for food.

With no government social services to aid him, Little Baron gravitated
toward "the big guys," his name for the young thugs who dominate the
slums where he foraged. He became a kind of gofer, running errands that
he won't talk about.

"I did favors," he said cautiously during a break between classes. "I
did what I had to do to eat."

One of those favors -- he won't say which -- landed him a year ago at
Fort Dimanche and Cell C-4. He shares the approximately 20-by-12-foot
cell with 28 other boys, 13 of whom sleep on the concrete floor because
there are not enough bunks. The cell has its own hierarchy -- one of
the oldest boys at the prison, a lanky 16-year-old, decides who sleeps
on the floor.

"Some of these big guys are rapists and kidnappers," Little Baron
whispered. "They boss us around."

When the cell door latched shut one recent afternoon, the noise inside
was deafening, and the nearby latrine cast a foul odor into the crowded
space. Little Baron took a flying leap into his bunk, trailed by a
skinny kid who caught up with him and pounded him in the ribs.

In the next bunk, 11-year-old Ricardo Exgentis broke into a rap song
he'd written during an arts class.

"Life is not easy," Ricardo rapped in sing-songy Creole. "Separation.
We don't know our brother, our sister. We living like dogs. That's bad
for Haiti."

Ricardo, who was arrested for banditry and sent here more than two
years ago, took his first shower at Fort Dimanche. Living on the
streets, he washed only when he could afford a bucket of cold water. In
prison, Penette-Kedar's group has taught him how to bathe properly and
brush his teeth.

But the shower still feels new and strange to Ricardo. He says he feels
uncomfortable being naked among all those boys and sometimes flees
without rinsing off the soap.

Talking about prison life made him angry. Rapping offered an escape.

"Give me a chance, that way I'll be able to tell the truth," he sang.
"I'm rapping for all the kids in prison. I'm rapping for the mothers
that's trying to make something out of nothing."

Ricardo's rapping was drowned out by the wall-mounted television
clicking on. Three boys climbed onto an upper bunk and leaned forward,
entranced by the explosions and the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns in an
action movie featuring Asian film star Chow Yun-Fat.

Pierre Sonson, a pensive 10-year-old who is not related to Little
Baron, raved about Chow's clothes. He and the other inmates wear
hand-me-downs, some with unlikely provenances. The boy next to him was
decked out in a "Girls Softball" T-shirt from Sonoma, Calif., wine
country.

"They look clean, they look like they smell good," Pierre said of the
actors. "I'd like to smell good."

When the movie ended, Pierre and Jenson Germain, 11, talked excitedly
about an upcoming holiday.

"There will be bands," Jenson said, his voice rising.

They smiled at the thought, but they were soon frowning. A tall boy
with a knife scar on his face had butted roughly into the conversation.
"You're not going to be released for the party," he said. "Face it,
you're not going to have any fun."

Jenson, who has been imprisoned for nearly two years, gulped back what
might have been a sign of weakness -- a tear. "I don't cry," he said a
few minutes later.

Little Baron, tugging at his waistband, sidled up next to Jenson. The
prison has no pants small enough for him, so he strings a shoelace
through two belt loops and pulls it tight. Little Baron thrust his
right foot into the air, imitating a karate kick he saw on television.
His pants slipped to his knees. He and Jenson fell onto a bunk
laughing.

Outside, a woman walked into the courtyard. This was a rare sight -- a
mother visiting her son.

Yola Aeme settled onto a bench and stared wordlessly at her 16-year-old
son, Antoine Menchy, who has spent a year and a half here. Aeme, 38,
still seethes about the day her son was arrested. She was frantic when
he didn't come home. No one had told her about the arrest.

"There's nobody I can see or talk to, no lawyer or anybody," Aeme said
dejectedly. "I have no hope that they'll release him."

Antoine bunks next to a wisecracking 16-year-old with delicate, curled
eyelashes named Rikensen Louis. Rikensen spends great chunks of his
free time hunched over a pad of paper composing letters that he tries,
always unsuccessfully, to persuade prison guards to relay to a judge.

"How you doing, Majesty?" Rikensen wrote recently. "I already spent 10
months in prison without knowing why would you think of me mister?"

Rikensen, who says he was imprisoned for stealing a radiator, stuffs
his letters into a purple shirt. He always writes exactly the same
words. Over and over. He's lost count of how many letters he has
written.

When he gets mad, he throws out all the letters and vows to stop
writing. But weeks pass with no sign of hope, he said, and soon he
finds himself writing those same words all over again.