Cutting Youth Re-Offending in Kyrgyzstan

Tuesday, 14 December, 2010

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Yelena Voronina

The authorities in Kyrgyzstan should overhaul the juvenile detention system to help young offenders reintegrate into society when they are released, experts say. 

While the country’s main young offenders’ institution provides schooling, vocational training and social adaptation programmes are only just getting off the ground. And once ex-offenders are on the outside, no provision is made to prevent them reoffending or to help them find work and fit into society.

Kyrgyzstan has just one detention facility for young male offenders aged between 14 and 18, the period of criminal responsibility for minors. Located near the village of Voznesenovka, 70 kilometres from the capital Bishkek, its 69 inmates are serving sentences for less serious crimes.

The facility is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with accommodation in barrack-style dormitories with bars on the windows, a school and a football field. It suffers from the same kind of problems as other penal institutions in Kyrgyzstan, such as inadequate heating and a shortage of food and winter boots for inmates.

There is no analogous facility for female offenders aged 14-18, and officials say there are no plans to build one. They are held inside a women’s prison in Stepnoye in the northern Chui region, but separately from the adults. Currently there are just four girls in the unit; they do not have schooling but can train in practical skills like hairdressing. Female young offenders convicted of minor crimes are generally given suspended sentences or alternative penalties.

Young offenders of either sex under the age of 14 are not incarcerated, and are the responsibility of local government social service departments wherever they live. A special school for this category used to exist, but was closed five years ago at the insistence of Kyrgyz NGOs concerned about the treatment of inmates.

Cholpon Omurkanova, who heads Egl, a non-government group focusing on young people in trouble with the law, is among those who believe work with young offenders has to start while they are locked up. Of the ten boys released from the Voznesenovka institution every month, four or five will come back after re-offending.

She said special programmes were needed to help them prepare for freedom.

“They need to be prepared for it, so that when they’re released, they find their feet and understand how to move on,” she said.

Omurkanova’s NGO is running a project to set up Kyrgyzstan’s first youth rehabilitation centre, which will open by the end of this year in the Voznesenovka institution. The project, backed by the Danish aid group DanChurchAid, is being implemented in collaboration with the prison authorities.

Many child rights activists want to see a network of rehabilitation centres outside the penal system, to work with recently-released young offenders by finding accommodation and jobs for them.

Among them is Mahabat Temirbek-Kyzy, a senior advisor to the labour ministry’s child protection department, who agrees that Kyrgyzstan needs a better system for dealing with young offenders.

“It’s very important for Kyrgyzstan to have [state] social services equipped with rehabilitation techniques and educational… mechanisms, which would see young offenders as the subjects of a process, and their crimes as a symptom of an ailment these services would have to treat,” Temirbek-Kyzy said.

She stressed that the ministry would welcome any NGOs that wanted to run rehabilitation centres, and reminded them that they could apply for government-funded contracts to carry out such work.

“Unfortunately, there aren’t any social [rehabilitation] centres for minors with suspended sentences or who’ve been recently released,” Temirbek-Kyzy said.

In the last three years, only a couple of NGOs had applied for funding to work with young offenders, and the one that won a contract was focusing on helping them get their documents in order, apply for jobs and find accommodation.

“But that isn’t enough to get an adolescent fully back into a normal life,” she said. “Nor is it enough for the state alone, or NGOs alone, to be working on this. A consolidated approach is needed, also bringing in international organisations from countries where this kind of approach has been successfully mainstreamed into overall child protection policies.”

Experts on youth offenders agree that helping them catch up on education is a key part of the rehabilitation process.

The Vosnesenovka facility has its own school that uses the standard state curriculum, plus additional learning programmes to help students fill the often massive gaps in their education.

“Sometimes they arrive here without being able to read the alphabet,” Kuraman Nazarbekov, who runs the detention facility, said. “They’ve been doing other things on the outside.”

He noted that some young men learn enough to go on to higher education after their release. “They’ve started families, been in work, and raised children, We’re very proud of lads like that,” he said.

The school head, Valentina Geraschenko, said most students were between four and six years behind with their education when they arrived that they could not catch up. “They have lost any interest in studying and effectively broken all contacts with school,” she said. “The amount of time they serve here is also a factor. If one of them turns 18, he’ll be transferred to the adult facility, and if another is released early, he will have no opportunity to complete his education on the outside.”

An IWPR contributor who visited the school said facilities were basic, with old desks designed for much smaller children and amateurish attempts at refurbishment. Teachers complain of a shortage of textbooks, atlases and writing materials.

Russian is the only teaching medium, as there are too few Kyrgyz-language books available, and this puts children from the countryside and from neighbouring countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan at a disadvantage.

Geraschenko and her team of ten teachers appear to be doing their level best against the odds.

“To us they’re just children. Each one has ability, some have talent. It’s only while they’ve been here that many of them have been able to show their ability,” she said. “Our task… is to show every adolescent that there’s light at the end of the tunnel even if he’s gone astray and committed an offence.”

She added that having a few more teaching resources would make the classes more engaging, although some local teachers and educationalists had helped out by passing on used textbooks.

One of the inmates said the school had given him hope of becoming an IT specialist when he got out.

“They understand that there’s a lot we don’t know, and help us catch up on what we’ve missed,” he said. “In here I’ve realised that I’ve got ability and that I can be proud of doing well at studying. Our school is no worse than the ones on the outside, but I wish we had new textbooks and maybe computers.”

A 20-year-old former inmate who gave his first name as Kirill is one of the success stories. After four years in Voznesenovka, he got out two years ago and enrolled on a carpentry course at a college in Bishkek. Since then he has found a decent-paying job at a furniture company, where the manager took him on despite his past conviction.

“I’m trying to forget the past. Now I’ve got a job and an education. I dream of building my own house.”

Kirill’s story is fairly typical of the young people who pass through the youth detention centre at Voznesenovka. He left home at the age of 12 to escape beatings from his new step-father after his mother remarried, and lived on the street, occasionally being picked up by the police.

“I stole things and sold them to feed myself,” he recalled. “I was lucky all the time, until I got caught.”

Once in the detention camp, he had to start making up for the year of school he had missed. “I’m grateful to the teachers,” he said. “They did a lot for me. If I’d had such attentive teachers at my old school maybe I wouldn’t have ended up in detention.”

Like many prison staff and current inmates, Kirill would like to see the Vosnesenovka facility providing training in practical trades. There was nothing like that when he was there, and he got the idea of training as a cabinet-maker after coming across a slim book on practical crafts.

Yelena Voronina is a human rights activist in Bishkek who has attended IWPR training.

This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.
The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.