The High Court directive that the authorities free all children currently in various jails all over the country could not have come sooner. By the standards of civilised behaviour, both on the part of individuals and institutions of the state, it is morally and even legally inexplicable why persons under eighteen years of age should be kept confined in prison. Yes, there may be offences committed by the very young, but that does not allow the state to treat these young in the same way that it treats all hardened criminals. Besides, when the institutions of the state begin to feel that children should be kept in jail, without any possibility of freedom, they are only making sure that these children will in time turn out to be hardened criminals themselves. It is just the sort of condition we as citizens would like to prevent from shaping up.
A few days ago we reflected, in these columns, on the poverty which stalks a very large number of Bangladesh's children. And now comes this very grave matter of what we must do about children who, for a multiplicity of reasons, have found themselves in prison. The first step, surely, is to have them freed as the High Court has directed. These young should never have been sent to prison in the first place. It is a testimony to the callousness with which our institutions operate that they generally do not distinguish between a need for punishment and a requirement for a sensitive handling of acts that we do not approve of. The HC judgement speaks for all of us when it suggests what the lower courts and the relevant ministry ought to have done about these children. In other words, these children should have been kept in safe homes and away from places (in this case, jails) where they have been brought in touch with some rather nasty aspects of life.
Let the authorities now take up where the High Court has left off. The more than a hundred children (media reports speak of the figure being 145) in prison must now become the responsibility of the authorities. These children, after their harrowing experience in jail, are in need of counselling to return to normal life. Unless such counselling is provided to them, they will bear the scars and with that the stigma associated with imprisonment for a very long time. Now the job is cut out for social welfare ministry and its safe homes.