Ulma Haryanto & Arientha Primanita – Jakarta is no city for buskers, beggars, roadside sex workers, the homeless, delinquents and the mentally challenged who are poor. This is what any staff member at Jakarta's social welfare centers will tell you.

In theory, these institutions are there to "rehabilitate" the less fortunate. But in practice, they are either transit centers for those netted by the Jakarta administration's Public Order Agency (Satpol PP), or temporary homes for the elderly and the mentally challenged.

"The groups of undesirables who come to this city are endless," Ruminto, an official at the Bina Insan Bangun Daya center in Cipayung, East Jakarta, told the Jakarta Globe on Friday. "Even with the new regulations and procedures [on public order] that we now have and are implementing in the field, new faces keep cropping up. Once you end up here, it takes time for you to get out."

To be officially released, those admitted to a center must provide necessary documentation, including ID and family cards; official letters from the city agency that dropped them at the center and from the Jakarta Social Affairs Agency; and a stamped and signed document from the person being held promising not to return to the streets. "When they hand everything over, we will discharge them for free," Ruminto said.

For those with nobody to claim them or who don't want to leave, the center would simply wait 21 days before deciding to which of the other welfare centers they can be transferred.

Jakarta is home to at least 25 of these social welfare centers, Ruminto said. "We have institutions for people of all ages. Children and the elderly. The mentally challenged and teenagers. We have one specifically for drug users, but we don't have one especially for roadside transsexuals."

In these centers, many are common faces. Ruminto said Vera, a mentally challenged woman in the Cipayung center picked up by public order officers on Friday, was a frequent guest. Speaking in broken English, she said: "Hello, sister! I'm sorry. Don't hit me."

"Once she claimed she was a victim of sexual violence. The next time she said she was pregnant. I'm not surprised to see her again," Ruminto said.

Eva, originally from Garut, West Java, who was in the center after being picked up for busking, said Vera was sometimes the center's sole entertainment.

"We laugh at her. She likes to take her shirt and pants off," Eva said. On a more serious note, she said she had no other livelihod option. "I am not good at hairdressing, so I busk. I make Rp 50,000 [$5] to Rp 90,000 a day. Other than this, what else is there, really?"

The center gives few reasons for these women to want to stay: accommodation in a cramped cell with 20 to 30 other people, raised wooden platforms for beds and a 14-inch television with no sound.

The centers are also home to people who don't feel they should be there in the first place. At the city's social welfare center in Kedoya, West Jakarta, 23-year-old Sarni sat in the hallway. She was breast-feeding her baby daughter while minding her two other children.

"My son was playing near Carrefour in Mangga Dua, North Jakarta," she said. "I was sitting near a busway shelter when suddenly officers came and took my son away. He did nothing wrong. My kids and I were then taken. We haven't done anything wrong. I am no beggar."

Sarni said she lived in Pademangan, North Jakarta, with her husband, a garbage collector. "My husband gives me Rp 300,000 a month. It is enough."

Each block in the Kedoya center has a steel fence. The residents are sometimes locked inside their cells, which have no beds.

Tarmijo Damanik, head of the Kedoya center, said the facility accommodated people picked up in raids by public order officers. He said the shelter was currently running at maximum capacity because of an increase in the number of raids over the past two weeks.

One such current resident is Syariffudin, 27, from Kebayoran Lama, South Jakarta, who was brought in this week after being caught working as a three-in-one traffic jockey in Permata Hijau. "I earn around Rp 50,000 a day; I have my own regular costumers. I really like the job," he said.

The center budgets Rp 21,000 per person for three meals a day.But Dayat, a beggar, said that even though he received food every day, he did not want to be at Kedoya. "I feel trapped. I'm young. I want to be outside."