After a short stint at an observation home, the Juvenile Justice Board sent him back to Trilokpuri only for the pattern to repeat itself. This time, he and a group of friends got into another drunken fight. Whether anyone got injured, or knives or blades were used, he refuses to say.
The police, suspecting that he was an adult, sent him to Delhi’s notorious Tihar Jail. They ordered a bone ossification test, but he spent the two months that it took for the results to arrive in Tihar. The test put his age at “between 16 and 18”. After another few weeks at an observation home he was back in circulation.
By now he’d become notorious in the locality, and a fourth incident followed. Despite having had the bone ossification test, he was once again put in Tihar. “I told the police I was a juvenile, but they didn’t listen,” he says. This time, he spent 18 days at the prison, before being transferred to an observation home. On both occasions, despite having spent time in Tihar, he was kept in observation homes where there was minimal segregation of children based either on their age or the nature of their offence.
The only time a probation officer visited him was after his first arrest. “How can the Juvenile Justice Board send a child back into the same circumstances, often to parents who might actually encourage them to commit crimes?” asks a visibly angry Suman Nalwa, head of Delhi Police’s special unit for women and children.
Bharti Ali also accuses the board of functioning in an “ad hoc” manner. “They have too many cases, and are in a hurry to close them.” This leads to sentences that are inadequate, she points out, citing a case in which a teenager accused of raping a seven-year-old girl was let off after three months in an observation home. Haq is challenging that verdict.
The special home and ‘place of safety’ lies a few kilometres from Sewa Kutir. The structure, crammed into an area the size of a few basketball courts, was once a British armoury. It looks as impenetrable today as it must have been in its heyday. Its 30-foot walls, painted in a fading, rain-streaked yellow, are topped by barbed wire. Private security guards patrol a parapet behind the fence.
Juveniles who have been here say the dormitories are housed in two large undivided sheds with eight-feet thick walls. There’s little light or ventilation; the only open recreational space is a volleyball court.
Inside the administrative offices, in a smaller compound adjoining the home, a group of officers is taking a tea break. On a wall hangs a white board listing the number of inmates. There are only a few — there were 25 till a few days back, but some have been released. There are now four children in the special home and 11 in the ‘place of safety’.
The most ‘difficult’ children — repeat offenders or those accused of crimes like rape and murder — are kept here. They’re all in the 16-18 age group. The officers can’t wait to spill their woes, but they want to stay anonymous since they’re not authorised to speak to the media. “These kids are rough; it takes them less than a minute to crack a person’s skull,” says a welfare officer. “Every few days one of us is beaten up. The other day they smashed a cook against a wall.”
“But there’s little we can do about it,” says a security official. “The Juvenile Justice Board doesn’t allow us to punish them in any way. It takes their word over ours. If a few kids get together and complain about one of us, we are suspended without even a hearing.”
To substantiate what they’re saying, one official points to a pile of what looks like construction debris — broken pipes, taps and metal rods — stacked in a corner of the superintendent’s office. This, they claim, is the doing of the inmates. “They wreak havoc at the slightest provocation.”
Another opens out a roll of paper to reveal a dozen metal strips, the edges of which have been sharpened against stone to make them knife-sharp. “The kids made these using strips taken from an air cooler. We found them suspended from threads under a manhole cover.”
Some of the ‘inmates’ held in the ‘place of safety’ have, according to the officials, spent as many as four years in adult prisons before it was discovered that they were juveniles when they committed their crimes. That experience has scarred and hardened them, and all of them are now over 18. “We’re not equipped to handle these people,” the official says.
