A POCKET SIZED LOOK AT WHAT IS CALLED THE "JUSTICE SYSTEM"

Today is Prison Friday and all I am going to do is post some graphs and bits of information from the Sentencing Project below.  I will follow this with an article about raising babies in prison from the   Socialist Worker...

INCARCERATION

 
The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails -- a 500% increase over the past thirty years. These trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and state governments being overwhelmed by the burden of funding a rapidly expanding penal system, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not the most effective means of achieving public safety.

RACIAL DISPARITY

More than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.

DRUG POLICY

Sentencing policies brought about by the "war on drugs" resulted in a dramatic growth in incarceration for drug offenses. At the Federal level, prisoners incarcerated on a drug charge comprise half of the prison population, while the number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased thirteen-fold since 1980. Most of these people are not high-level actors in the drug trade, and most have no prior criminal record for a violent offense.

The Sentencing Project works actively to reform the federal mandatory penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses to make them more equitable and fair. To become involved visit our crack reform page.

JUVENILE JUSTICE

There has been a troubling shift in the nation’s responses to at-risk youth over the past 25 years. The creators of the juvenile justice system originally viewed it as a system for providing prevention, protection, and redirection to youth, but it is more common for juveniles today to experience tough sanctions and adult-type punishments instead. While reforms are underway in many places, there remains an urgent need to reframe our responses to juvenile delinquency.

WOMEN IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

The number of women in prison, a third of whom are incarcerated for drug offenses, is increasing at nearly double the rate for men. These women often have significant histories of physical and sexual abuse, high rates of HIV infection, and substance abuse. Large-scale women's imprisonment has resulted in an increasing number of children who suffer from their mother's incarceration and the loss of family ties.

FELONY DISENFRANCHISEMENT

Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions. Felony disenfranchisement is an obstacle to participation in democratic life which is exacerbated by racial disparities in the criminal justice system, resulting in 1 of every 13 African Americans unable to vote.

SENTENCING POLICY

Changes in sentencing law and policy, not increases in crime rates, explain most of the six-fold increase in the national prison population. These changes have significantly impacted racial disparities in sentencing, as well as increased the use of “one size fits all" mandatory minimum sentences that allow little consideration for individual characteristics.

COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCES

Increasingly, laws and policies are being enacted to restrict persons with a felony conviction (particularly convictions for drug offenses) from employment, receipt of welfare benefits, access to public housing, and eligibility for student loans for higher education. Such collateral penalties place substantial barriers to an individual's social and economic advancement.

Raising babies in prison

April 1, 2014

Jessica Hansen-Weaver looks at the political and social questions raised by prison mother-infant programs in an article originally produced for University of California Berkeley's "Journalism for Social Change" class.

An incarcerated mother holds her infant child inside her prison cell

PRISON IS no place to raise a baby. Or is it?

Prisons are punitive, inhospitable by design. So, not surprisingly, the fact that some prisons house infant babies is shocking to most people.

While prison nurseries have existed in this country for a century--the first was established in 1901 at Bedford Hill Correctional Facility north of New York City--there is renewed interest in expanding these programs today.

There are currently prison nurseries in 10 states--California, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska, New York, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming. And state Rep. DebraLee Hovey recently introduced a bill to establish a prison nursery in Connecticut.

These programs allow a mother to parent her infant for a finite period of time--from 30 days to 30 months, depending on the facility. To participate, the woman must meet certain criteria: a nonviolent offender status with no history of child abuse or neglect. Some nurseries form a wing or segregated unit of a prison complex, and others are off-site in community corrections settings (often called mother-infant programs.)

While there are important differences between prison nurseries and mother-infant programs, they both rely on a shared premise that some women prisoners ought to have the opportunity to nurse and bond with their infant.

Support for prison nurseries is informed by some research that claims these programs reduce recidivism rates and provide a way for mothers and babies to bond during critical periods of infant development. Attachment theory suggests that infants need to establish a relationship with at least one primary caregiver in order to ensure healthy social and emotional development.

The expansion of mother-infant programs coincides with the increasing incarceration of women. Over 200,000 women are behind bars and over 1 million are on probation or parole, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.) And the number of prisons for women has multiplied eight times over the last three decades, according to a 2006 report from the Institute on Women and Criminal Justice.

The majority of incarcerated women are charged with nonviolent, drug-related offenses. While three out of every five women in state prisons have a history of drug dependence, only one in five of these women receives substance abuse treatment.

Because women tend to be the primary caretakers of children, the massive increase in women's incarceration has had devastating effects on families. According to the Sentencing Project, one of every 50 children in the U.S. has one or more parents incarcerated.

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THESE TRENDS challenge many of the moral and ethical principles of both those concerned with the welfare of children and the rights of offenders, begging big-picture questions about the prison system itself.

Outspoken opponents of prison nurseries include the likes of Jim Dwyer, a professor at William and Mary Law School in Virginia. "What's really shocking," Dwyer said on CBC Radio's The Current, "is that no one talks about the legality of putting children in prison." Dwyer argues in his 2013 research paper Jailing Black Babies that housing a child in prison violates their Fourteenth Amendment rights to citizenship and equal protection under the law.

Dwyer considers himself a supporter of children's rights, but consistently counterposes the interests of children to their criminalized parents. His proposed alternative to prison nurseries and mother-infant programs is to terminate the parental rights of pregnant offenders in order to steer their children toward adoptions.

Incredibly, he argues that "[i]t is imaginable that women awaiting a criminal trial likely to result in a prison sentence will try to get pregnant in anticipation of incarceration. Dwyer is also infamous for advocating that "the state should zone some horrible residential areas 'no child zones' and remove children born into them."

Through this sort of inflammatory rhetoric, as well as a failure to investigate the systemic inequalities that underlie child maltreatment, Dwyer supports a racist ideology that classifies incarcerated people of color as unfit to be parents.

Why does Dwyer's supposed concern for the rights of Black babies not lead him to question the racist nature of criminal justice system? While he may profess concern for the lives of "innocent Black children," he cannot bring himself to show any solidarity with their mothers.

Many experts on prisons and child welfare don't take such extreme positions, but they are still are uneasy about the theory and practice of prison nurseries.

Jill Berrick, a University of California Berkeley social welfare professor who sits on the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care, expressed "ambivalent feelings" after visiting the nursery program at the California Institution for Women in Chino, Calif.

"I was filled with pleasure in seeing babies with their parents," Berrick said. "This program really does give mothers a fighting chance to form deep attachments with babies, which we know is important for infant development and it can inspire women to get out quickly...with obvious benefits to parents, children and society."

But Berrick also had reservations and asked questions. "At what age is it appropriate to move children out of prison? When do they realize where they are, what are children's stories that they take with them into childhood and adulthood when they have been born and raised in prison? What we don't know is whether this makes a difference later on in development."

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ANOTHER CONSIDERATION is the potential re-traumatization of mothers and babies when the period of bonding afforded by these programs is severed.

Carol Strickman is a staff attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), where she serves on the Family Unity Project. LPSC was one of the advocates that helped establish mother-infant programs in California in the 1980s.

At that time, the implementation of these programs was understood within a rights framework. As Stickman puts it, "Every child has right to lifelong relationship with their parents, and every parent deserves lifelong relationship with children." However, Stickman pointed out that LSPC can no longer support these programs after a child almost died in a San Diego correctional facility.

Denisha Lawson was incarcerated in a community-based correctional facility operated by Center Point, Inc., where she resided with her infant daughter Esperanza. When Esperanza developed a serious respiratory infection, Denisha demanded that she be able to take her daughter to get medical help.

Center Point refused to grant Esperanza medical attention as she was not a prisoner, and thus not its responsibility. After two weeks of impasse, a visiting nurse checked Esperanza's lungs and demanded the facility send Esperanza to the hospital for emergency care.

Strickman explained that "these programs are prisons first and day cares second. Mother-child relationship will never trump security issues in a prison."

Organizations like LSPC advocate for alternatives to prison. "We don't want to send any pregnant women to prison," says Stickman. "People need more options in their community that can reduce unemployment, crime and increase education in low-income communities." Stickman pointed to community-based programs such as Delancey Street Foundation, a residential re-entry program, as an alternative to mass incarceration.

In many ways, the discussion around mother-infant programs represents a step forward in the national discussion of mass incarceration by focusing on the rights of women prisoners to bond with their babies. In a March 6 interview on Democracy Now! author, scholar and activist Angela Davis described the challenge facing prisoner's rights advocates:

It's a problematic moment. Those of us who identify as prison abolitionists, as opposed to prison reformers, make the point that oftentimes, reforms create situations where mass incarceration becomes even more entrenched...therefore, we have to think about what in the long run will produce decarceration, fewer people behind bars, and hopefully, eventually, in the future, the possibility of imagining a landscape without prisons, where other means are used to address issues of harm, where social problems, such as illiteracy and poverty, do not lead vast numbers of people along a trajectory that leads to prison.

The image of a mother nursing her child in a prison nursery belies the scale and brutality of our system of mass incarceration. Prison nurseries acknowledge the humanity of the mothers participating in these programs. At the same time, they force us to look at the contradictions of such a system and ask why women who have been trusted to take care of newborn babies are being treated as threats to society?

If we want to have a society where babies don't have to experience life behind bars, we need to address the collective rights of the men and women who bring these babies into the world.

POLISH FARMERS: THE LAST LINE OF RESISTANCE TO FRACKING OUTRAGE

For ten months the people of Zurawlow, Poland, have been occupying a field near their village attempting to stop Chevron in its tracks. Under the protection of security, and in a very tense atmosphere, Chevron had taken possession of land to install a fence and drill a well last summer. 

According to the locals, this land has only been permitted for seismic testing. The authorization for drill testing was canceled in June 2012 and therefore Chevron has no right to drill. 

The Polish farmers are opposed to unconventional shale gas drilling because it could lead to the contamination of their water and land; during previous seismic tests on-site explosives were used and had already caused water pollution, it became unfit for consumption. 

On Monday, this week, things ratcheted  up a notch and announced Poland's gas giant PGNiG and Chevron agreed to jointly hunt for shale gas in southwestern Poland in a move to speed up the exploration amid tension with major gas supplier, Russia.

The Polish government representing international Capital has offered a frack-friendly proposal of making shale gas extraction tax-free in the country. The tax break will be “a huge incentive” to get investors interested and on the ground, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday, adding that by 2020 taxes “shouldn’t exceed 40 percent of extraction income.”

RT points out,

Earlier in February, Poland ditched plans to use a state company to explore for shale gas, instead deciding to auction off licenses to foreign companies. Exxon Mobil and Marathon Oil are both interested in the country’s shale industry. Some state-controlled companies have also won licenses for exploration.

Maciej Grabowski, Poland's environment minister, expects the country's first commercial shale gas well to be drilled this year, and hopes to have over 200 wells in the next few years. 

Earlier this year, the European Union’s attempts to set legally binding regulations for shale gas extraction were defeated after the UK and a number of EU states (including Poland) argued that current EU regulations are sufficient to keep fracking safe.  Instead companies will be asked to follow voluntary guidelines.

Quoting from a January 2014 RT article:

“This is obviously a very disappointing and alarming proposal,” Antoine Simon, shale-gas campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe was quoted by Bloomberg News in January. It “ignores the studies the commission published and fails to protect Europe’s citizens from the health and environmental risks of unconventional and dirty fossil fuels.” 
“I think it is sad that the European Commissioners are protecting the interests of a handful of fossil fuel companies rather than the interests of Europe’s citizens,” the Green MEP Claude Turmes told EurActiv. 

The EU proposals have “nothing in the way of real protection for the thousands of ordinary people who will see their lives and local areas turned upside down if the fracking industry gets its way,” Lawrence Carter, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace in London, said in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

“This is likely to be only the beginning,” Caroline May, head of safety and environment at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright LLP in London was quoted by Businessweek. “The difficulties for the regulators are the political differences across member states and the differing reserves, which mean that some countries can ‘afford’ to have no policy or to protest, whereas for others like the UK there is a real resource as well as financial imperative.” 

In fact, in the midst of global climate talks held in Poland last November, the Polish government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk flouting the international call for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions suddenly fired  Environment Minister Marcin Korolec and replaced him with a man closely associated with the nation's gas fracking industry.  

Following the firing Maciej Muskat, director of Greenpeace Poland said, "This is nuts. Changing the minister leading the climate negotiations after a race to the bottom by parties of the convention shows Prime Minister Tusk is not sincere about the need for an ambitious climate deal...Furthermore, justifying the change of minister by the need to push the exploitation of another fossil fuel in Poland is beyond words.

All of this is happening despite early reports of bad results in the shale oil game in Poland.

The last line of defense may just be a handful of farmers  in a remote back area of Poland...and that may just be enough.

NOTE: Read through the entire article below and you will discover what solidarity can mean...above and beyond the action for which the solidarity originated.  When the multitude begin to work together, they figure out all kinds of things...

The following is from Red Pepper.

Fighting fracking in Poland: 

the farmers’ resistance movement

An improverished farming community in Żurawlów is using creative tactics to stop Chevron’s shale gas plans, writes Marta Rozmysłowicz

When Chevron arrived in Żurawlów, a small village in Poland’s rural Grabowiec county, it was like a UFO landing in the open wheat fields. In June last year a high-tech surveillance caravan appeared in the village to stake the firm’s claim to the shale gas below: it is equipped with satellite antennas and halogen lights, and staffed by a private security company hired to keep an eye on the locals.

What Chevron didn’t realise, however, was that they had just brought the battle onto the villagers’ home turf. Local farmers used hay-bales to build a barricade on the only accessible road to Chevron’s field. They set up headquarters in a tent on the field next door, and as the summer protest extended into the winter months it was turned into a full-scale barracks. In the wet season the farmers widened the drainage ditch along the road that surrounds Chevron’s field, making it inaccessible for heavy-duty fracking equipment. Then they parked their tractors and trailers in a blockade beside the field, leaving Chevron stuck in the mud.

This is not the farmers’ only strategy. They have also been taking Chevron’s claims to the field apart, one permit at a time. This has been quite effective thanks to the firm’s lack of attention to detail – Chevron has not even been able to conduct preliminary seismic tests because its every move is challenged with appeals to the county and regional authorities. At this point it appears that Chevron has hardly any of the necessary permits to legally drill in Żurawlów.

Grabowiec and Goliath

Chevron corporation, one of the world’s biggest oil and has companies, had revenue of over $220 billion in 2013. Grabowiec County, meanwhile, is situated in south-eastern Poland and part of the poorest region in the country. The median income per month is 2,700zł, or $896. Żurawlów itself is a 106-person community of wheat, rapeseed, corn and sugar beet farmers.

Yet the Grabowiec County farmers’ meagre means haven’t held them back in the battle against the goliath that is Chevron. Word about the county’s resistance to fracking first began to spread two years ago, when the neighbouring village of Rogów succeeded in beating the company back.

Chevron, like other companies experimenting with fracking in Poland, had just bought a batch of concessions to underground resources put up for sale by the government. It took four adjacent concessions in south-eastern Poland, one of them in Grabowiec. Rogów was its first stop.

The villagers signed agreements with Chevron’s subcontractor to allow seismic testing on their land. The big machines drove onto the fields and caused mini-earthquakes that made walls crack and the turned well water black. Furious, the villagers blocked any further work.

News of their protest spread quickly, despite heavy pressure from local and state government to keep this sort of thing quiet, especially where fracking is concerned. Rogów attracted the attention of a French television station and soon foreign journalists were asking difficult questions in the Polish countryside. A Polish investigative special followed suit, and soon the villagers of Rogów were speaking out about shale gas at conferences around the country.

Donald Tusk, the prime minister himself, came in to smooth things over with Chevron, which agreed to leave Rogów alone and move over to neighbouring Żurawlów. That was mid-2011.

Soon after that, Chevron representatives showed up in Żurawlów in expensive SUVs with big city registration plates. This time they were better prepared. The company hired Grażyna Bukowska, a former television talk-show host as its PR representative and immediately invited the villagers to a town-hall meeting to lay out its drilling plans. But Chevron’s slick show-and-tell presentation still left locals utterly unconvinced, and the meeting ended with Chevron walking out – and the people starting to organise against them.

International solidarity

Żurawlów is quite remote by Polish standards. It is flat and surrounded by endless wheat fields. The nearest city, Zamość, population 65,000, is 20 miles away. Yet today, the barricade is an international protest centre.

The farmers have a live webcam streaming from the occupied field round-the-clock, which they also use for internet conferences with the press and other grassroots groups fighting corporations around the world (occupychevron.tumblr.com). Walls inside the barracks are covered with posters, stickers and solidarity gear; there are crocheted caps made by the Knitting Nannas Against Gas from Australia, stickers from the reclaimed airport ‘La ZAD’ near Nantes in France, posters from Balcombe in Sussex and solidarity banners with the people of Ecuador.

Despite the geographical distance, Żurawlów feels very close to Ecuador. The farmers fear that they too will be left facing the same ecological devastation and economic strife that Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, sowed in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 to 1990. The company dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater, spilled roughly 17 million gallons of crude oil, and left hazardous waste in hundreds of open pits dug out of the forest floor.

What more, people in Żurawlów are taking notes on Chevron’s mudslinging legal methods. 36 of the villagers already stand accused of various petty charges, ranging from the vague ‘use of generator’ to the vaguer ‘use of building materials’. It is clear to everyone is that such tactics aim to hit protesters financially, an approach that resembles Chevron’s response to the Ecuadorian campaign for justice, which the company sued under the RICO Act, a law designed to deal with mafia intimidation.

Co-operative alternatives

Walking through Żurawlów, tension hangs in the air with the fog. The private security cars drive around the small town day and night, stopping in front of houses to write down registration plates and get a glimpse of who’s inside. A cameraman shows up from time to time to record close-up takes of people’s faces and profiles. He follows the ones who seem most involved, most outspoken.

But the Żurawlów farmers know that their campaign, Occupy Chevron, has allies throughout Poland. When the farmers put out calls for support, people come from the cities. It is these alliances that could offer a way out of the region’s grinding poverty – an alternative to selling off the fields for fracking. Thanks to the ups and downs of the market, the farmers are often forced to sell crops for less than the production costs. This past August, rapeseed prices were as low as 1,140zł ($345) per ton. The wheat, corn and sugar beet markets have not been any kinder to the producers.

What looks like a real possibility for Żurawlów come the harvest is an autonomous food co-operative, based on direct links between producers and consumers, building on the support they have gained over the issue of fracking. Relying on a solidarity network rather than the free market can guard against the unfair disparities in prices that have left farmers in the region so economically downtrodden. For places like Żurawlów, Rogów and countless others where communities are forced to ‘choose’ between an already bad situation and a devastating investment, autonomous grassroots structures offer another way.

Nine months into the barricade, the farmers’ organized approach has got Chevron cornered. Its subcontractor has started to withdraw equipment and it looks like the protest camp is heading for victory. Discontent is also growing in surrounding villages, where the company paid impoverished farmers 20zł ($6) to drive heavy seismic testing equipment onto their fields. After a few rounds of this the fields were destroyed – but so, a few nights later, were some of Chevron’s gadgets. The resistance is growing, along with its toolkit of strategies.

THE MANY FACES OF WOMEN'S OPPRESSION IN EGYPT TODAY

Pharaonic women figures by artist Alaa Awad represent Egyptian women who led movements for social change in Egypt's history and the role of women in the Revolution today

I have no idea why, but an article I did last summer on the struggles of women in Egypt has been getting loads of hits this last week.  With that in mind, I decided to return to the subject.  While a survey around the time of last summer's article found that 95% of Egyptians thought sexual harassment was a serious problem, and while another survey by the UN reported that 99.3% of Egyptian women had experienced sexual harassment or assault, it also seems that a large number of Egyptians continue to blame the victim for provoking the assault.  H.A. Hellyer has written,

Sexual harassment was not always at the level it is now – but as it becomes more acceptable, it becomes more widespread. It is not simply about the way in which a woman dresses that provokes harassment – the data shows clearly that substantial numbers of victims were wearing very conservative clothing, including the headscarf or even the face veil. The presence of the woman, it seems, is enough in and of itself.

The recently adopted  Egyptian constitution contains, according to Hibaak Osman of the organization Karama,

...more than twenty articles relating to women and discussing their equal rights under the law. For instance, Article 11 grants equality of women and men with respect to all rights, including political rights, social rights, cultural rights, and economic rights. The article from the 2012 constitution referring to the traditional Egyptian family was removed. Meanwhile, women’s equal representation in parliament and in public positions (mayoral, local councils) has also been adopted in the new constitution.

That is good news.  However, the question is will it matter? The constitution is unclear on how those who fail to implement it can be held accountable. The constitution will be powerless without active implementation. It must be supported by national and local infrastructures, beginning with stringent laws that reinforce its articles and intentions. 

Will it?

Well, right now that infrastructure does not exist and without it, without penalties, women will enjoy freedom only in theory, not in reality.  Again from Osman:

Without action, words are just that – words.  We are now at a critical juncture, not only in Egypt and Tunisia, but also in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, where discussions of peace and transition are ongoing, and in Jordan, Morocco, and Sudan, where women continue to face vulnerability due to the absence of hard-hitting laws. Establishing ‘red lines’, holding conferences, announcements and denouncements – these are the warm blankets that governments and their institutions have used to cover the glaring need to work beyond textual commitments and to find new ways to galvanize sustainable action at the local, national, and international levels.

Meanwhile, women are not only struggling in the streets, they are struggling in the home. Israa Said Thabet, a 26-year-old mother of two children who lives in Asyut, 375 km from Cairo says,

We are witnessing a revolution against every traditional aspect. We still have a long journey ahead, but we are becoming increasingly aware that there is no more such a thing as ‘a weak woman’.

Despite the strong battle being waged by women in Egypt, the patriarchy hangs strong.  

Lorenzo Kamel and Maha Ezzat ElKholy write, 

This increasing awareness does not imply that local women have experienced practical improvements. On the contrary, women’s growing contribution to the household and their increased involvement in activism did not in fact lead yet to greater power: the harmful aspects of patriarchy have in some contexts worsened and a new patriarchal structure has emerged.

Doaa Salah, a 23-year-old mother from Sandibis (Qalyubia Governorate), represents in this respect another powerful example. She got married after finishing her high school, but soon divorced and started her personal struggle against old traditions and “one-sided rules.” Doaa wanted to regain her freedom.

“I totally disliked the cultural impositions and the routine imposed on me by this society,” she said.

In villages like the one in which she lives, to get divorced is still considered an outrage. “Men”, she argues, “are used to treat me and the other divorced women as if we were public properties.” Despite these traumas and the huge pressure exerted by her family, she is determined to continue to fight for her rights. “I chose what I wanted,” she concludes with pride, “I am a free woman.” 

But are the women of Egypt in general and what does this freedom mean?

Meanwhile, sexual harassment, cultural patriarchal beliefs and structures are not the only ways to oppress women in Egypt these days.  What you will read below is something, unlike all that I have written so far, you likely have not heard before.

The following is from the Cairo Post.

Women signing their lives away: Egypt’s criminalization of debt

Photo Courtesy Of Misr El Kheir Foundation Official Facebook Page

By NOURHAN MAGDI

CAIRO: Many of the women entering the office of the Misr el-Kheir charity are afraid to give their names to anyone who asks. They come and go, seeking legal advice and assistance, and often their families do not even know where they are living.

These women are debtors, and fugitives from the law. Many of them are illiterate, and say they are being held accountable for sums well over what they thought they had committed to. Without witnesses to corroborate their stories, however, they are unable to defend themselves in Egypt’s courts, and are wanted to serve prison sentences as punishment for the debts they have accrued.

Debtors may face up to a three-year sentence according to Article 376 in the penal code, away from their children and families, for accumulated debts that ruined their lives. About 6,000 debtors are now landing in prison across Egypt, according to the head of media office at the prisons department, Mohamed Eliwa, who said that the number is unstable.

Only when the debtors pay, have their debts paid for them, or the trader pardons them, are they released from prison.

Many debtors do not see themselves committing a crime when borrowing money to help a daughter get married, or to finance a medical operation for a family member, social researcher at the debtors’ program in Misr el-Kheir Charity Foundation Ramy Mahmoud told The Cairo Post, adding that most of the cases they see are for women.

The penalty for “breach of trust” equates poor debtors with those who have fraudulently passed bad checks and with fugitives who can afford to pay back the money they owe but instead choose to remain on the run, professor of constitutional law Ramadan Bateekh told The Cairo Post.

Sometimes women are imprisoned over small debts, as low as 500 EGP (U.S. $71), said deputy Manager of the Debtors Program in the foundation Gaber Rushdy.

Some women debtors are in prison not for personally borrowing money personally but for being co-signers, added Rushdy. He said that traders oblige wives to co-sign in order to twist their husbands’ arm to pay off the money.

The problem starts when the debtors sign a blank promissory note to buy their essentials, commented Rushdy, as he explained that the promissory note is mainly used by unscrupulous traders “to write a fake value that may reach over 100,000 EGP ($14,367.82).”

“Some traders know how to manipulate law articles and make illiterate debtors sign blank promissory notes, then file a lawsuit to collect his money, which exceeds the real value, where the debtor could face 20-30 years in prison if the debtor is unable to pay off,” continued Rushdy.

“Neither the traders nor the blank promissory note is monitored.” He said, “This problem does not have a solution.” said Bateekh.

“The Consumer Protection Law in the constitution is very weak and it is one of the reasons for the imprisonment of poor and innocent debtors,” said Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Consumer Protection Association Amir el-Koumy to The Cairo Post.

Sabrine: I would rather cut off my fingers than sign another blank paper

Sabrine Abdu, 42, is an illiterate housewife who has four boys and a girl. She found herself obliged to pay a debt of more than 300,000 EGP ($43,000) after she bought a washing machine and a used telephone that only cost 3,500 EGP ($500).

“It all started when I went to buy a washing machine and a telephone and pay by installments from ‘Hajj Ahmed’ from North Cairo for 3,500 EGP,” Abdu told The Cairo Post.

She said, “He insisted that I sign 30 blank promissory notes. Four of which were worth 300,000 EGP, and he obliged my husband and my son to co-sign the promissory notes.”

“First, I paid 800 EGP and he promised to give me the 30 promissory notes by the last payment,” Sabrine said. She said Hajj Ahmed regularly intimidated and yelled at her in front of her neighbors and forced her to pay money. Sabrine said she felt herself weak and pressured saying, “I could not prove that I did not owe him money as I had not received any of the 30 promissory notes I had signed.”

Sabrine kept paying 300 EGP for more than two years, until she exceeded the real debt value. She said, “I paid more than 18,000 EGP ($2583) for him.”

When she refused to make any further payments, her creditor filed a suit against her husband, as he is one of the co-signers on the promissory notes, demanding payment of 60,000 EGP. She said, “He wanted to imprison my husband to put me under pressure after I stopped paying him money.”

“Hajj Ahmed fully intended not to file the 30 promissory notes all at once in order to keep threatening us,” she said.

“My husband was sentenced to three years. But after the Misr el-Kheir Charity foundation helped him and reached a settlement with Hajj Ahmed to pay half the money, he was released,” said Sabrine.

Three days after his release, Sabrine was arrested, and held responsible for 300,000 EGP, and she said Hajj Ahmed asked her to arrange a settlement of 20,000EGP through the Misr el-Kheir foundation.

After a week in prison, Sabrine was now released after the Misr el-Kheir foundation paid her debts and helped her become self-employed by buying her sewing machines to design curtains.

“I would rather cut off my fingers than sign blank promissory notes again,” she said.

Rushdy said that Misr el-Kheir is trying to “raise people’s awareness, especially in poor villages and encourage them to stop signing blank promissory notes.” Misr el-Kheir has its own social researcher team which reaches out to poor villages and goes door to door in order to explain the problems of signing blank promissory notes.

Social Researcher Mahmoud explained that the majority of the debtors are “living hand to mouth,” and have falled into debt following the economic recession and security unrest after the January 25 Revolution.

Badriya el-Borai, 55, is one example of this. She is a widow who lost three of her six children in different accidents. Being wanted by the police over failing to pay off her debt, Borai is now living as a fugitive away from home to avoid arrest.

“I got a loan worth 7,450 EGP to start a new project to sell blankets and clothes,” Borai told The Cairo Post. “Under the security unrest following the [January 25] Revolution, I was conned by many customers who did not pay for clothes they bought, leaving me unable to pay off my debt to the bank.”

Iman Hassan, 31, also struggled for years to overcome a debt of 150,000 EGP. Although she graduated in 2005 from the Faculty of Arts, “due to the problem of unemployment [facing] youth, I tended to distribute pre-paid mobile cards and acted as a saleswoman, fulfilling orders on discounted catalogue items to clients. It was very profitable,” she told The Cairo Post.

She said she borrowed 40,000 EGP to pay for an operation for her father, and first found herself in trouble after a trader sold her counterfeit mobile cards, and said she was unable to find another job.

“I started to sell my clothes to pay the debts,” she added. “I also headed to the Moral Affairs at the Ministry of Defense, but they refused to give me a loan.”

Iman said she signed a number of blank promissory notes with traders and people she borrowed the money from until she was burdened by a debt worth more than 150,000 EGP. She added, “The Salafi Call paid me 40,000 EGP, Misr el-Kheir paid 10,000 EGP and my fiancé sold our home for 30,000 EGP to help me.”

“The problem is that my fiancé is a co-signer on the promissory notes and now he is wanted by the police,” continued Iman. “He was prompted to move in and live with his friend in order not to get arrested.”

Being engaged for seven years, Iman said she feels sorry and guilt for implicating her fiancé in the problem.

With tears dropping on her hand, Iman said, “I saw three awful years under stress of unaffordable debts.” She added that she only solved three quarters of her debt and she is trying now to work and payoff 70,000 EGP ($10,043). She continued, “I am working now as a private teacher for children besides running a project established by Misr el-Kheir.”

Egyptian debtors’ crisis: ‘Law does not protect the duped’

“The people’s ignorance of law is not an excuse, and it is mainly the problem. And whoever signs a promissory note deserves punishment,” said professor of constitutional law Bateekh. He said the promissory note problem is not monitored.

Signing a blank promissory note is a tool of pressure used by the creditors to force low-income people to pay more than the requested money, but “unfortunately it is hard to be discovered by the court, and here the law does not protect the duped” said the dean of the Law Faculty at Cairo University Mahmoud Kbeish to The Cairo Post.

Kbeish added, “The constitution criminalizes the act of signing a blank promissory note but only if there are witnesses who are able to testify to the court that the promissory note was blank when the debtor signed it.” He noted that signing a blank promissory note falls under the penalty of “breach of trust,” which serves a penalty of three years imprisonment.

Trapped by illiteracy and poverty, most of women debtors are responsible for shouldering the burdens of a family breadwinner, said Soheir Awad, the manager of the Debtors Program at Misr el-Kheir, to The Cairo Post.

International covenant not legislatively implemented

Egypt is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 11 of which prevents the imprisonment of individuals over failing to pay their debts: “No one shall be imprisoned merely on the ground of inability to fulfill a contractual obligation.”

This article, however, does not apply to blank promissory notes, which are not treated as civil debts but fall under the “breach of trust” penalty, said Kbeish, Since the notes do not have details about the trade process carried between the trader and the client, they are treated as criminal debts instead of civil ones, he said.

Further, Bateekh said that article 11 has been under consideration, for more than six years, before the Supreme Constitutional Court in order to be activated in the constitution. He added, “If this article is implemented, it will definitely help the debtors.

“We have high deficiencies in the legal system and the judicial practice,” said Executive Manager of the Observatory of General Budget and Human Rights Helmy el-Rawy to The Cairo Post. Rawy added that the constitution in Egypt is obligated to consider international agreements, although they are not implemented on the legislative level, “And this is considered a violation to the international covenant.”

Moreover, Rawy noted that the Committees of Covenants at the United Nations have submitted many recommendations in this regard to Egypt.

Egyptian law should state that the provisions of the agreements are part of the law, as well as carry out legislative amendments, added El-Rawy.

Promissory notes’ article needs amending

The article on promissory notes in the constitution is very weak and imprecise, and some legislative amendments are needed to exactly define on whom the “breach of trust” penalty is applied, said Koumy.

“Also, the law of the consumer protection in the constitution does not penalize high priced goods and large installments,” Koumy said. “The Consumer Protection Agency is delinquent in fulfilling its role in observing and protecting consumers amid the current absence of a strict system in the country,” he added.

About 3,200 government-subsidized marketplaces and outlets, where goods sell at much lower costs than an average market, are inactive and neglected in Egypt, said Koumy, suggesting the state to make use of them to provide goods with cheap prices for the low-income citizens.

On the other hand, Kbeish’s opinion was that the debtors’ problem cannot be solved through legal amendments, saying, “It is the state’s role to change society’s culture and improve people’s living situation.”

The chairman of the National Association for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms (NADRF) Waleed Farouq said that the current efforts in this regard are personal or private initiatives launched by charity foundations, such as Misr el-Kheir, which announced it has helped to release 18,000 debtors since 2010.

Farouq said the Armed Forces have also recently become involved in debt forgiveness. A recent initiative announced by the army would pay off money for jailed women debtors.

On August 8, 2013, for example, the military forces released 48 women prisoners, whose debts vary between 1,000 EGP ($143.6) and 15,000 EGP ($2,155). The army said this would be only the first batch but more release have yet to happen.

“The Ministry of Solidarity should have a role in providing markets with low-priced goods for low-income citizens to lift the burdens off them and protect them from greedy traders,” said Farouq.

Further, Farouq suggested that the state should be officially represented to monitor the deals on installments between the customer and the trader, which would guarantee traders’ rights and that clients are not deceived.

Kbeish disagrees, on the other hand, saying he doubted the ability of the state to observe the dealings between the trader and the client, because traders would refuse since he would face long procedures in the civil courts when the promissory notes are considered as civil debt not criminal. He added that in the event the client cannot pay off his debt, he would have his properties seized rather than be jailed.

The head of the Central Department for Associations and Unions in the Ministry of Solidarity, Khaled Sultan, told The Cairo Post, “The Ministry does not pay for the debtors, but this is the charity associations’ job. The ministry only monitors these charity associations administratively and financially.”

Between lax legal articles and the absence of guarantees in both the constitution and implementation, women debtors who have been deceived or swindled continue to be imprisoned in Egypt.

Having yet to achieve their right to a decent life, debtors in Egypt will always be haunted by loose laws that turn them into criminals, where they either end up as fugitives or behind bars, resorting to charity associations to pay off their debts.