A 13-year-old girl recently sentenced to seven days’ detention in Corradino prison – from where she was transferred to Mount Carmel Hospital, after it turned out there were no facilities for females under 16 – was released yesterday after serving out her full term.
She leaves in her wake a trail of unanswered questions about Malta’s justice system and its correctional facilities; in particular, about YOURS (Young Offenders Unit Rehabilitation Services), which – like the notorious chocolate it sounds like so much – is evidently “not for girls”.
The case goes back to March of last year, when three girls aged between 13 and 14 were prosecuted for their part in a fight with another group of similarly aged girls in Valletta. All three were found guilty by Magistrate Antonio Vella of verbal abuse, and one of causing slight injury to one of the other girls, apparently by pulling her hair. They were sentenced to seven days’ detention, but while two of the girls filed an appeal against their sentence, the third did not… for reasons which have never been made fully clear.
As a result, the youngest of the three offenders was left with no option but to go to jail, becoming the first female offender of her age to be incarcerated at Corradino prisons.
Her defence lawyers, Vincent Micallef and Andy Ellul, acknowledge that so long as the law allows discretion on the part of the magistrate to apply a maximum four-year detention sentence in such cases, then no one can really complain about the application of the same discretion in this particular case.
They also pointed out that while apparently severe, the sentence actually fell far short of the stipulated four-year maximum. Also, unlike a criminal conviction, detention for contravention charges is not entered into the person’s criminal record.
“As long as the law remains the way it is, then it can always be applied,” Micallef admitted to MaltaToday. “The question we should be asking is: do we want under-16 year olds to be punished in this way? If the answer is ‘yes’ then we can leave everything as it is. If the answer is ‘no’, then the relevant section of the Criminal Code should be amended – as it was in fact amended in 2002, to increase the maximum penalties – in order to grant the courts the power to resort to a sentence which is non-restrictive to liberty, after all the due factors will have been taken into consideration.”
Micallef believes that such an amendment need only apply in cases where the defendant has a clean criminal record: as in fact was the case with the 13-year-old girl in question.
Regarding alternatives to detention, these may include community service. But as long as it remains both theoretically and practically possible to condemn an underage girl to prison in Malta… then why isn’t the prison itself equipped to accommodate such inmates, either on its own premises or in a separate facility elsewhere?
George Busuttil, of the welfare organisation Mid-Dlam Ghad-Dawl, confirmed independent reports that the girl in question could not be held at YOURS because it is a male-only block, and no satisfactory facilities exist to separate boys from girls. So instead, she was placed in an isolation cell just outside the juvenile section.
Busuttil stressed that the child was well taken care of by the prison authorities, but he added that sending such young offenders to prison was in any case counter-productive.
In the end, she was almost immediately transferred to Mount Carmel Hospital, a fact which only raises another pertinent question regarding our treatment of juvenile crime. Apart from serving as a clinical hospital for psychiatric cases and other conditions such as alcoholism or substance abuse… does Mount Carmel also double up as a last resort precisely for such cases?
Meanwhile, efforts to contact the prosecution office all day yesterday proved futile.