Word: prisoners
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They're living with mom, however, inside the Women's Correctional Facility in La Paz, Bolivia. There are about 250 prisoners here - and also 100 kids. In fact, the country's lock-ups house more than 1,400 children behind electrified, fence-topped walls and below shotgun-guarded towers. Among the prisoner-mothers at the Women's Correctional Facility is Andrea Virginia Tapia, who has been behind bars for four years and is expected to be released next year. (She won't discuss her crime.) "Above all in this life, I am a mother," says Tapia...
Advocates argue that keeping the children inside prison may also have positive effects on their convict parents. "Having a child near helps the parent reform his or her actions and be more eager to rehabilitate and readapt to society," Lopez adds, noting that Bolivian legislation on this issue was based on studies reflecting that trend. (See pictures of how boxing helps prisoners in Thailand...
...equally important question, of course, is what prison time does to the children. Estensorro acknowledges that "we see a lot of repression in the children." Kids inside the Women's Correctional Facility are punished for normal behavior like waking up in the middle of the night - because they end up waking up everyone else inside the cramped sleeping quarters. School age kids leave the prison each day to attend regular schools but nonetheless suffer isolation from their peers. Another problem: the lack of 24-hour medical care inside the prison. Worse, kids must sometimes share mom's punishment...
...instead of attempting to remove the children, most efforts in Latin America today focus on improving in-prison services that benefit both parent and child, like constructing day care centers in or near the facilities and providing inmates with good-parenting workshops. The plight of these children, however, doesn't seem to be high on any relief organizations' list. Save the Children runs programs for the 200 children inside Bolivia's San Pedro men's prison, but that's the extent of its work in Latin America. CARE does not deal directly with this population, and various United Nations agencies...
...July 2006, the authorities foiled a plot to plant suitcase bombs on commuter trains in Cologne's main station. The explosives failed to detonate and no one was injured. A Lebanese man, Youssef Mohammed el-Hajdib, was convicted in Dec. 2008 of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison for the failed attack. A year earlier, another Lebanese man, Jihad Hamad, had been sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Lebanese court for his role in the plot...