Nivell Rayda – A group of about 10 detainees in a cramped cell at a Depok police station jostled to be first in line when guards brought around their lunch rations.

The much-awaited meal consisted of a small lump of rice and vegetable soup with no meat in sight, contrary to what they had apparently been promised by guards. Regardless, they wolfed down the food.

In a corner of the tiny room, away from the commotion, one detainee sat quietly, too scared to touch his food.

At just 14 years of age, Hussein (not his real name) was by far the youngest person in the four-by-three-meter cell he had been sharing with hardened criminals and drug addicts for the past two days.

His small stature, he said, invited bullying from his cell mates, and made fighting back an impossibility. They first shook him down for money. Finding him penniless, they decided to take his meals instead.

"I miss my mother," Hussein said. "She's in Tegal [Central Java] with four of my younger siblings. She doesn't have enough money to come and visit me. She can only pray for me and asked me to take good care of myself."

The teenager said he came to Jakarta to work as a laborer at a construction site. "They only needed me for about a week, so I didn't even make enough for the bus fare home, let alone to feed my brothers and sisters," he said. "After a couple of days without a place to stay, I became desperate and started to steal things."

There were wounds across Hussein's face and angry red marks all over his body, inflicted, he said, as vengeance after he was caught trying to steal a cellphone from a woman in a shopping mall. But he was reluctant to discuss some of his injuries that appeared to be more recent.

"It's been days since I've had a good night's sleep," he said. "Sometimes I just close my eyes hoping this is all a bad dream."

Delinquents or criminals?

Hussein is only one of thousands of children and teenagers under the age of 18 who run afoul of the law. The Indonesian Commission for Child Protection (KPAI) estimates that more than 7,000 children could be currently incarcerated nationwide.

"This is the figure we got in February," KPAI commissioner Apong Herlina said. "The majority of these children were sentenced to between three and six months in prison, so some might have already been released by the time we released our study. It's hard to get an estimate of just how many children are incarcerated or sentenced each year."

Despite ratifying a law on juvenile courts in 1997, Indonesia does not have a justice system specifically designed to deal with young delinquents, and law enforcers often use a punitive approach for child offenders.

If found guilty, juveniles should be placed in special correctional facilities for children, though a lack of space at these facilities means that doesn't often happen. Juveniles still under police investigation – like Hussein – are detained along with adult suspects.

"Most police officers don't understand children's rights. Children are treated just the same as any other criminals without paying attention to their well-being or psychological state," Apong said.

"As far as the police are concerned these children have broken the rule of law and must be punished. But these children are actually victims of a lack of parental guidance, poverty and sometimes peer pressure."

Unicef estimates that 84 percent of children sentenced in Indonesia, including for petty crimes, are placed with adult criminals in detention centers and prisons with little or no access to education, health or recreation.

Studies in other countries on prosecuting juveniles as adults have shown that compared to those held in juvenile detention centers, youths held in adult jails are 7.7 times more likely to commit suicide and five times more likely to be sexually assaulted.

Puji Astuti Santoso, chairwoman of the Masudi Putra Handayani Boarding House, one of only four facilities established by the Ministry of Social Affairs to rehabilitate young offenders, said that nearly all of the children sent to the center had experienced physical and mental trauma.

"There are about 20 children each year transferred from the Directorate General of Penitentiary Affairs to this facility. The children have to be put into some kind of quarantine for the first week," she said.

"Usually they have infections, rashes or other contagious diseases. Prison life was hard for them so they show some form of depression, which take its toll on their physical health. Their bodies become frail and more prone to diseases. Emotionally they are more reserved and traumatized, so it takes time for them to fit in."

Future lost

Although the KPAI has not conducted any formal studies on the correlation between juvenile incarceration and recidivism, agency commissioner Apong said examples were abundant.

"You must remember that children are emotionally less stable than adults. Children see adults as authority figures, and in the case of those detained in an un-segregated cell, those figures are criminals," she said.

"We have observed a lot of cases where these kids fell deeper into a web of crime. They are taught to steal by the masters of thievery. Mix them with drug dealers and they become drug mules."

In their 2000 essay, "Prosecuting Juveniles in Adult Court," US researchers Malcolm C. Young and Jenni Gainsborough said that given their developmental immaturity and incapacity to understand the legal process, children are also vulnerable to police or prosecutors who put words into their mouths in order to gain a "confession."

"The adult criminal system is designed for the prosecution of adults. The process is adversarial and no allowance is made for the limited experience and understanding of a young mind," the legal experts say.

"Judges and lawyers in adult courts are not trained to understand children's levels of cognitive development nor attuned to the way they speak. As a result, children in adult criminal court are at a disadvantage as compared to adults in the same courts."

Upon re-entering society, many juvenile convicts find it hard to return to school or get a job because of the stigma attached.

"Even my father doesn't want me," said 22-year-old Rahmat Basuki. "After I was released from prison around eight years ago my father told me not to come home. If he sees me coming back to my house he immediately becomes enraged and threatens me with a knife."

"Eight years ago I was devastated by his actions," Rahmat said. "Now I find it hilarious."

Rahmat was arrested after being found with a knife. "My friends also carried weapons to school, but mine had chicken blood on it which police assumed was human," he said.

"My friends were released without any charges the following day, but not me. I was detained for two weeks and later sentenced to nine months in prison. My parents didn't come throughout the trial process."

After learning that he couldn't go home or back to school, Rahmat decided to return to the only place willing to accept him, prison.

"The guards and the other inmates were my only friends back then. So I went to see them," he said. "I helped the janitors clean the cells, becoming an unofficial office boy, working for food and shelter."

Proponents of the retributive system to punish juvenile delinquents argue that prosecuting children as adults serves as a deterrent for others. But a 2010 study by the University of California, Los Angeles on the effects of prosecuting juveniles as adults found that within a three-year time frame, 82 percent of juveniles prosecuted as adults reoffend, a rate 16 percent higher than their older counterparts. These youths were often rearrested for more serious crimes than their original ones.

Finding a way out

In February last year, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono approved a proposal for 500 young prisoners to be pardoned after visiting a juvenile detention center and calling for a more merciful justice system for children.

The president himself noted that 90 percent of the children who ended up incarcerated were either unaware that they were committing a crime or were simply out of options and desperate.

Chandran Lestyono, spokesman for the Directorate General of Penitentiary Affairs, said that out of the 500 juvenile prisoners whose pardons were approved by Yudhoyono, only around 50 immediately received a full pardon.

"Not all of the pardon proposals were approved by the Supreme Court after they reviewed each of the cases personally," he said. "We gave the rest sentence reductions and eventually they were released on parole. Some children were transferred to Social Affairs [Ministry] custody."

Last Monday, more than a year after the president's oder, Patrialis Akbar, the justice and human rights minister, said the government was finally drafting a new bill on juvenile offenders to replace the 1997 Juvenile Offenders Law. The new bill, he said, would usher in a new set of regulations compliant with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This UN convention and Indonesia's own 2002 Child Protection Law stipulate that detention should only be used as a last resort, but imprisonment is often the first and only resort for children who have committed crimes in Indonesia.

But it could be months or even years before the bill is passed. In the meantime, teenagers like Hussein continue to suffer in jail.