Lizzie Sadin

It is a standard practice for minors to be held with adult detainees, having to cope with violence, abuse, physical punishment, sexual exploitation, forced prostitution, rackets and gangs. They have no access to education; family visits are rare or non-existent; overcrowding in prisons, promiscuity, malnutrition, poor hygiene and the lack of medical care are all common occurrences. Young detainees are placed, often to be forgotten, for many long years, for the sole purpose of excluding and punishing them. And what about the children held in custody pending a trial and who are often held for much longer than the period of the sentence finally handed down? What about the harsh sentences, not only for serious crimes, but also for minor offences such as stealing bread, a rooster or rice growing in the paddy, simply because these young people were hungry? The vast majority of these minors who end up in prison camps are from poor, disadvantaged backgrounds and minority groups. These children do not choose to break the law, but are victims, victims of poverty and lack of opportunity, and their opportunities are even fewer once they become part of the prison system. Prison only makes their situation worse, and it would be more sensible to offer them an alternative sentence to help them fit into mainstream society. A prison sentence can only be warranted and justified when it is intended to rehabilitate the offenders, but such initiatives are very rare. For juveniles, often the only prospect is jail, and imprisonment is the only model they see. How can education be an aim, when the only option proposed is prison? And then there are military-style American boot camps based on the belief that tough discipline is a form of education, when it is nothing more than obedience and constraint. In France there have been calls to rescind the 1945 law which states that educational measures must be given precedence over provisions under criminal law, these being reserved solely for exceptional circumstances. An absence of dignity gives rise to hatred and rebellion; similarly, the failure to bring these young people back into mainstream society leads to recidivism. I wanted to use my position as a photographer to show the legal system for minors in ten countries with very different geopolitical situations: peace and war, rule of law and authoritarian regimes. From one continent to another, we are inevitably struck by similarities: the same jails, the same isolation cells, the same distress and the same determination of prison guards to destroy any resistance from the young detainees. At the outset, I had working hypotheses, but they did not all survive the test. In Colombia, where there is an interminable civil war, plus the violence of gangs and drug dealers, proposals have been developed for alternatives to prison. In Israel I was granted access to top security enclosed detention centers. In the United States, the image of juvenile justice fell far short of the grand status of the world’s leading democracy. In Madagascar, poverty is the reason for the dire conditions in detention centers. In the final analysis, taking into account the educational and financial resources available in the different countries, democracies do not do any better than the others. I encountered enormous difficulties – and that is an understatement – in getting the authorizations needed in the course of the eight years devoted to this project; for example, it took me 18 months to get through the procedures to be allowed just 90 minutes in each of the three prisons I visited in Russia; in the United States, the procedure took three years. In all I made requests to around forty countries, and the ten I visited allowed me into around sixty detention centers. There were thousands of young people I met behind bars. Some of the conversations will remain with me forever. I was moved by Sergei, Sacha, Dimitri, Pablo, Armando, Pascal, Alain, Matpala, Rivitchet, Khaled, Ali, Ron, David, Swasan, Evariste, Philibert, Sabrynn, Mike, and so many more. I was driven on by the idea of providing us with a view inside these detention centers and of conveying the views of the inmates to the outside world. I wanted to restore dignity to these young people, to break the silence surrounding them and, most importantly, to break their isolation. It is a story designed to bring them out of the shadows.

Lizzie Sadin

I wish to express my gratitude for the 3P Grant, instituted by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which helped fund my reports in Israel, Palestine and India.