Banana Republic watch

I recently spoke by phone with Michael Garcia Bochenek, who is the senior counsel to the Children’s Rights division of Human Rights Watch. Bochenek, who previously served as the director of law and policy for Amnesty International’s London secretariat, has extensive experience visiting child detainees in the United States and around the world. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what he learned from seeing detained children abroad, the attitudes of guards at border facilities, and why America makes it so difficult for human-rights advocates to visit detained children.

As this largely self-imposed humanitarian crisis has been developing on the border, what have you made of the images and reports you have been seeing, especially given your international experience?

“Self-imposed” is really the right word, not only in terms of a manufactured emergency. This is something that, numerically speaking, isn’t very unusual, something that in terms of capacity isn’t that much of a challenge, in a country with considerable resources. Anytime we are looking at deficiencies in terms of conditions of detention, lack of access to needed programming, lack of attention to mental-health and other health services—the cause of that is not that there is not money, or there is no capacity, or there is no expertise, as has been the case in some places that I have been. It’s a policy choice. It’s a choice to inflict these kinds of conditions on people, and in this case on children.

Can you discuss those other detention centers that you have seen around the world, where the conditions stem from a lack of expertise, or the country is overwhelmed?

The closest contexts that I can think of are primarily in the juvenile and criminal settings. These are kids, and sometimes adults, who are charged with crimes or convicted of crimes and who are going through a criminal process as opposed to an administrative immigration situation. For example, kids held in Brazil, or kids held in many other Latin American countries, are often held in overcrowded conditions. There is often a severe lack of access to necessary health care. Sometimes the quality of food is an issue. Rarely, in the case of Brazil, are education or other kinds of activities wholly unavailable, although sometimes there is a significant gender difference in terms of who gets offered what. Boys might get access to sporting activities, and girls are expected to sit quietly and do needlework. There are problems in that regard.

But, significantly, it’s not really a question, in a place like Brazil, that kids should have access to education. The question that often arises there is what curriculum should they follow, given that people are coming in and out all the time. In the United States, in contrast, particularly with these immigration holding cells, there’s absolutely no pretense of offering education. Even though, in some cases, we’re talking about having kids for weeks. If there are standards with relation to activities, they’re certainly observed in the breach.

In terms of caring for detained kids, is this something that democratic countries have always been much better about? Or is that distinction not helpful?

I think the answer to that probably has less to do with the form of government and more to do with other decisions. European Union countries have very few kids in detention, whether that’s juvenile justice or immigration detention, as compared to the United States. The United States is kind of a standout in the world, in the worst sense possible, around detention. When European countries do detain kids, they often do so with lots of support services.

In fact, at one point, I taught children’s rights at Georgetown Law School, and I took the law students, who were both U.S. students and foreign students, into the D.C. juvenile-detention center. A lot of the students from countries other than Europe were shocked by how clean U.S. facilities were. The U.S. students were appalled at the conditions. And the European students couldn’t believe what they were seeing. For the European students, particularly those from Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, and so on, what they were used to from their home countries was a far more nurturing environment than what they were seeing in this institutional setting that could well have been, in their mind, an adult correctional facility. Possibly for very, very serious offenders.

So are you saying democratic traditions and values do matter, just not in the United States?

If you ask me to contrast countries that most people would describe as democratic, those are the two obvious ends of the spectrum that come to mind. But—just to name a few places where I’ve gone into detention centers—Angola, Liberia, Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala have significant degrees of repression, or certainly have targeted people for speaking out. Including kids. But, in all of those places, there’s some recognition that kids should be held in a way that is consistent with furthering their development. There is the idea of offering them rehabilitation, the idea of giving them a second chance, even if, in practice, that isn’t available because of the conditions in which they’re held. What is often lacking is the wherewithal to carry that out.

In many of the countries that I’ve been to, they have infrastructure that’s falling apart, staff that is going unpaid for periods of time—again, largely, it seems, because of resources. And there is an effort in some of these places to put real limits on the time that kids are held. So kids in Liberia, when I was there—very, very few of them are locked up, for very little time, even though in the adult system it was very common for people to be held without charge for the maximum time that was permitted.