Criminal Justice System.(Philippine facilities for juvenile offenders)(Brief Article)

When we enter the cell in Bilibid Prison, a group of inmates suddenly disperses. They had been hunching over something. We now see it is what seems to be a little girl dressed in scanty garments. She stands up, ashamed. Her eyebrows are drawn in large, swooping arcs. Her fingernails and toenails are painted maroon. "Isn't this a prison for male inmates only?" we ask our guide, a worker from the Philippine Jesuit Prison Service. "That is a boy," she says. The child stands up, adjusting his garments. We have apparently interrupted a scene of molestation. "This is the whole problem."

The diversity of problems in the Philippines is both remarkable and depressingly familiar--from a flat-footed economy to Muslim terrorists in the south to thick layers of official corruption. But almost all the country's ills can be traced back to a fundamental lack of justice. That sense reaches its starkest expression in places like Bilibid, 15 kilometers outside Manila. In the Philippines, children as young as 9 can be tried as adults and sent to adult jails. (Only a dozen juvenile- detention centers exist in the entire country, and they are usually full.) Conservative estimates say the number of such child prisoners has grown to more than 20,000, or 10 percent of the total prison population, almost all of them drawn from the country's slums and dirt- poor villages.

Human-rights organizations are lobbying the Philippine Senate to pass a bill that would mandate separate courts and more humane treatment for juveniles. But it's not certain that senators, who are worried about a rising crime rate, will pass it. "Our prisons are a microcosm of our society," says a senior Justice Department official. "The poor, especially children, have no one to protect them."

Minors in the country's jails confront conditions that even adults find brutal. The stench of rotten food and sweat in Bilibid's cells is overpowering. Sixty prisoners, both children and adults, are crammed into the 5-meter-by-7-meter cells. When riots break out, children are often pushed onto the front lines. "If the rival gangs want to fight each other," says a thin 16-year-old nicknamed JP, "they force us to fight each other first. That gives them an excuse to start."

Juveniles are abused more drastically than that by older prisoners. "Making children into male whores is common in prison, but the kids will never talk about it directly," says University of the Philippines sociologist Randy Davide, who has conducted several studies in Bilibid. Some victims can be identified by the scars on their faces. Others hide nails that still bear fingernail polish. "I've seen it happening at night," says Jun Jun, a 13-year-old who arrived in the prison several weeks ago and hangs his head when asked if he has been sexually abused. "We ...