STORY by VANESSA GARCIA
PHOTOS by MORGAN PETROSKI
Maria Jose Padilla will celebrate her 12th birthday in prison.
Behind guards clutching machine guns and 40-foot prison walls, she will transition from girl to young woman as she shares her mother’s four-year sentence. She sleeps piled onto a cement bunk with three of her siblings––ages 2, 3 and 5. Her mother, Betty Padilla, sleeps an arm’s length below them, cradling Maria Jose’s 6-month-old sister, who was born in prison.
Maria Jose is one of nearly two dozen innocent children who live with their detained mothers in the women’s wing of the main penitentiary in Ibarra, Ecuador. Red and blue crayon scribbled across cell walls and clothes lines draped with baby clothes serve as abrupt reminders that the narrow corridors built to imprison convicts also house children.
Maria Jose’s mother was arrested 30 months ago when police found cocaine and marijuana in their local home.
Like Padilla, most of the 51 female inmates were arrested as drug offenders, a charge that legally excludes them from protection against indefinite imprisonment before trial. As a result, more than one-third of the women detained in Ibarra’s prison still await sentencing from a judge.
According to a U.S. State Department report released in February of 2005, the average Ecuadorian prisoner waits up to one year before their innocence or guilt is decided by a court. In Ibarra, prisoners claim to spend an average of nine months watching the flamingo-pink paint peel off their cell walls before a public defender ever takes their case. These delays lead to overcrowding in an outdated facility where rooms are so stuffed, some new prisoners sleep on hallway floors.
Chronic overcrowding, combined with a government budget of just $1 a day per inmate, has deteriorated prison conditions, depriving women and their children of basic needs. This lack of physical space and inadequate funding for food, healthcare and rehabilitation continues to take its toll on a generation of children with nowhere else to go.
On a typical weekday, just after 1 p.m., Maria Jose is sitting on a bench in the empty women’s common area––a paved, roofless square between the four main sleeping pavilions. She sits quietly, swaying her lanky brown legs as she strokes the frizzy black curls on her baby sister Naomi. She has no baby dolls, books or activities to occupy the long hours when she isn’t in school or asleep.
Maria Jose casually admits that she hasn’t eaten yet that day.
According to guard Cristina Borja, female inmates receive one main meal daily. It usually consists of rice, soup and bread. Inmates with children do not receive additional food. Mothers ration and share what they are given, sometimes sacrificing meals to keep their children’s bellies from swelling.
Maria Bastidas, who shares a bunk with her two young sons and a room with about 15 other people, explains that the mothers often work together to buy fruit to make nutritious juice for the children. When there is no fruit juice, they drink dirty water.
“We have to fill their stomachs with something,” Bastidas says.
Inmates depend on loved ones to bring food to supplement the meager, poor-quality meal provided by the prison staff. Several women complain that the food served makes them vomit.
Maria Jose says the meals are so disgusting, on some days she would rather not eat.
“Here I’ve lost weight and so have my brothers and sisters,” she says. “Even when they have more than just bread, I don’t want to eat.”
Women who can’t rely on family or friends to bring food or other basic resources often suffer from inadequate nutrition.
Padilla’s husband, Leo, resides in the same jail, arrested a few months before her on drug-related charges. Padilla says he does nothing to contribute to raising or providing for their five children in jail. On visiting days, when female prisoners are granted permission to spend the majority of the afternoon in the men’s common area, he begs Padilla for food.
“I am the father and mother of my children,” she says indignantly, while trying to keep her 5-year-old daughter sitting long enough to wipe her nose. “My husband serves no purpose. He only bothers us.”
The inmates without outside help must work scrubbing and ironing clothes or cleaning for others to buy extra food, vitamins, formula, diapers, feminine products and toilet paper.
On a Tuesday afternoon, three women are crouched over cement sinks slapping wet pants and t-shirts over a rough edge, grinding them until the water that rushes through the gutter turns brown. The defined muscles in Padilla’s thick arms contract as she moves through a stack of filthy clothes with her 2-year-old daughter, Leonela, slung across her back. She charges 10 cents per item and usually washes about 20 or 30 pieces. She sends Maria Jose to buy food and diapers with the money she earns. In Ecuador, typical groceries, like a pack of toilet paper, box of milk and large bag of rice costs about $5. Padilla is starting to wonder how she will feed her newest baby once she can’t breast feed.
“My children are always starving,” Padilla says.
Victor Almeida, prison director, recognizes the lack of proper nutrition as one of the facility’s greatest problems. The prison’s budget of $1 per day is based on the number of adult inmates and does not account for the children’s needs.
“There is no money to feed the children because there is not money allocated for them,” Almeida says, “A lot of times our prisoners have health problems, and they cant eat just any food, so they don’t eat at all.”
Almeida attributes most of the facility’s problems to limited government funding.
“I am a critic of the government’s neglect and indifference toward the jails,” he says. “We survive only because charitable organizations offer assistance.” Almeida denies, however, that delays in sentencing, the prisoners’ most popular complaint, are a significant problem.
“The dedication and legal attention exists for each of them,” he says, referring to the prison’s two public defenders and a program that offers free assistance from private practitioners.
“We don’t have problems with our legal system,” Almeida says. “The problem is overpopulation, health, education and physical space.”
One of the prison’s lawyers, Dr. Freddy Jardin, acknowledges the legal “90-day waiting period,” and other sentencing delays as necessary to ensure thorough investigation.
Inmate and mother Yolanda Brusil, 23, has lived in the prison without sentencing for more than three months. She says she has not been contacted by a public defender since the first week she arrived. Her 9-month-old daughter, Valeria Alejandra, lives with her. Brusil was arrested after her mother called police, insisting that she was poisoning her own daughter–– the same child who is currently learning how to take her first steps across the dirt-caked floors of the prison. Brusil was incarcerated the same day her daughter was rushed to the hospital for tests.
“I’ve always had issues with my mother,” Brusil says, keeping her voice quiet and eyes toward the floor. “All results came back negative, but my mother still insists I was trying to kill my baby.”
She isn’t sure why she now has custody of the child she is accused of endangering. Inmates, dangling their legs off the edges of nearby top bunks, loudly interject their opinions regarding Brusil’s situation.
“We are poor, without power,” her friend yells from behind a thin sheet that separates her sliver of a bunk from Brusil’s. She refuses to give her name. “They know we are innocent. It is an abuse by the authorities because they have no proof.”
Brusil nods her head.
At the other end of the room, Anna Zolano, 23, lays on her belly, peering over the edge of her top bunk with her 1-year-old daughter, Leslie next to her. She says she was arrested on one of her first attempts at trafficking cocaine. As a result, her daughter will spend her first four years of life in prison.
According to Ecuadorian Law 108, “The Law of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances,” all drug crimes, no matter the quantity or circumstances of the arrest, are considered “Crimes of Reclusion.” All charges under this category require immediate imprisonment with no opportunity for bail. As part of the country’s fight to curb the influence of Columbian drug activity, drug crimes fall into the same category as murder, rape, kidnapping and armed robbery. Even association with a drug crime is grounds for imprisonment without bail.
Prisoner Janette Portilla, 35, has served 16 months of her four-year sentence for association with drug sales. Her daughter, Britney–– named after the American pop singer for her light complexion–– was a year old when she was moved to the prison with her mother.
As a devout Evangelical Christian, Portilla receives vitamins, toys, books, clothes and other supplies from the church. She rarely leaves her dark bunk for the loosely supervised common area where most inmates spend afternoons chatting and washing clothes before curfew at 4 p.m.
Britney toddles between the rows of bunk beds, giggling as she lets her stuffed animal skim the stained floors and walls. Portilla never lets Britney out of her sight, calling to her franticly when she steps too close to the open door of the room.
“You have to avoid problems, so I don’t let my daughter out there. It’s dangerous,” Portilla whispers.
If children argue with one another while playing, some mothers will pick fights with other mothers, she explains. “But God keeps me safe.”
When Britney moves near the door again, Portilla quickly stands to grab her, exposing a deep scar that runs vertically down her throat. A similar scar also runs across her shoulder.
She tried to kill herself shortly before she was arrested because she was ashamed of living with a drug addict. When she came to prison, she promised herself she wouldn’t try to commit suicide but admits she thinks about death.
“When you cry here, you must swallow your tears,” she says, pushing her wavy hair in front of her bare shoulders and across her neck to cover the scar. “Life isn’t so desperate.”
On weekdays, from 7 a.m. until noon, 10 of the older children are granted permission to leave the jail for school. Most attend the Alfredo Perez Guerrero School located directly next door.
Four of prisoner Matilde Maldonado’s seven children live with her and attend school. Her daughter Jomaira is 10 years old and in the third grade. During one of her classes, she sits by herself in the last pair of desks by the back wall. As the classroom erupts with chatter, Jomaira remains quiet, busy filling out her workbook.
Her long black hair is parted down the middle and pulled into a low pony tail, showcasing her round cheeks. Her mother was recently able to afford the school uniform which is comprised of long white tube socks, short turquoise leggings and a white collared shirt bearing the school’s crest. Jomaira’s outfit is faded and worn thin from washing.
Through bashful smiles, she says she sometimes feels different from the other students.
“They bother me by saying, ‘Well done that your mom is in jail.’ They tell me I’m an abandoned child,” she explains. “I mostly feel bad for my mom.”
Her mother sends a guard or social worker to take care of Jomaira and her sisters when they come home upset, she says.
Maria Jose attends school without a uniform. She says it doesn’t bother her that her mother can’t afford it or that some children pick on her.
“I don’t listen to them,” Maria Jose says.
The director of the school, Diana Ubidia de Almeida, insists that no discrimination exists against the children from prison.
“They don’t have school supplies, uniforms, sometimes miss school and forget their homework so we pressure them,” she says. “All the children here are poor. Nobody stands out.”
According to the school director there was an attempted escape from the prison in 2002. Male inmates jumped from the prison roof into the neighboring school yard, and teachers and students were forced to evacuate the school after police shot inmates in the street.
“We didn’t want them to see the broken legs and blood so we just ran,” she says.
“We live in constant preoccupation. We want the jail to be relocated.”
As for the children who not only attend school near the jail but also return to it at the end of the day, Almeida shakes her head with grief.
“Children shouldn’t live in that environment. It’s not for them.”
Guard Borja has been working 24-hour shifts in the women’s prison for more than a year. As a mother of three, she is often in disbelief of the physical and verbal fights that occur between some of the children.
“The children are more aggressive and fight with each other because it’s all they see,” Borja says. “Children should be free.”
Without toys or games, the children who aren’t old enough to attend school spend daylight hours creating activities from whatever they can get their hands on.
While women gather in one of the sleeping pavilions, a group of young boys entertain themselves by swinging the wooden door of the room precariously close to each other’s faces. Their mother calls to them twice from a bunk inside the room, but they ignore her warnings and she doesn’t get up to stop them.
On another day, a group of children are splashing in the water that spills from the sinks as the women wash clothes. Padilla’s 2 year old, Leonela, balances herself over the brim of a laundry bucket, drenching her plaid dress and diaper. A few minutes later, Leonela approaches a group of women, sucking on what seems to be a water balloon.
It’s a condom.
One of the older boys peeled it off the floor and filled it with water. Leonela plays with it until a spoon thrown under a bench catches her attention.
Prison director Almeida believes that young children should not live in prison if they have safe, alternative environments. But the reality is that most would live alone in the streets if they did not follow their mothers to prison. Because the government does not reimburse families who foster children, the availability of foster care is sparse.
“We have had bad experiences sending children to other homes temporarily,” he explains. “They are psychologically and physically abused, so it is preferable to have the children here.”
In fact, many mothers fight to keep custody of their children. Prisoner Janette Portilla says she doesn’t know how she would survive if her daughter was not with her.
“When I was arrested I was so hysterical, but I knew I needed to keep my daughter,” she says.
Portilla hasn’t had a visitor since the day she was taken to jail 16 months ago. She says her husband and family abandoned her in fear of also getting arrested. Still, she insists that she is not lonely.
“With my daughter’s company I don’t feel like a prisoner.”