Donate NowShaun McCanna, for the Pulitzer Center
I ask for a volunteer. Two girls raise their hand. The center's director points to one, and she walks to the front of the class. She is instructed to cover her face with her scarf; she is a minor so I am prohibited from filming her face or asking her name. My translator asks her age. Sixteen. How long have you been here? Eleven months. How long is your sentence? I was sentenced to fifteen years, but it was reduced to eight. Of what crime were you convicted? Before she can answer the director interjects. That question is not permitted. I move on and ask about her family.
In addition to the sixteen-year old volunteer, there are thirty-one other girls serving time at Kabul's Juvenile Detention Center. An adjacent building houses one hundred and twenty-five boys. The most common crime according to the director is theft, but abandonment (running away), adultery and murder are also represented, though these crimes are not always as they seem, especially as they relate to the young girls. Because leaving home to avoid a forced marriage can lead to a conviction for abandonment, being raped can lead to a charge of adultery, and many women and young girls are forced by their families to serve the murder sentences of male relatives.
But as questionable as the rule of law that placed them at the center may be, it is clear the Ministry of Justice, and by extension the Ministry of Education, are taking great pains to tend to their young charges. It was a pleasant surprise in a country whose adult penitentiaries are notorious for their horrendous conditions. What drew me to the facility was hearing it had a school. The Ministry of Education provides the center with seven teachers, and each incarcerated youth attends school for an hour and a half each morning, dividing the time between a literacy program and other course work.
In the afternoons, both boys and girls participate in vocational training, which includes sewing, carpet weaving, carpentry and shoe making. Though the space they live and study in is small—the boys and girls both live ten to a room that includes a toilet and sink—the space is well kept and in excellent condition by Afghanistan standards. Likewise, the youth all seemed well fed, and to be in generally good spirits considering their circumstances. Ironically, for some incarceration has meant an opportunity to attend school for the first time in years. I am speaking with a young man from the boy's wing and he tells me has been at the center for fifteen months, and has at least another year to serve. I ask if he went to school before he was jailed? I completed third grade. Why didn't you continue to go to school after third grade? I had to work. My family needed the money. You were convicted of what crime? The director allows the question. Adultery, he says. But it wasn't true.