My son thinks this cell is our home

Behind the high concrete walls of Lang’ata Women’s Prison, the wrought iron gates, and razor wire, past the armed prison waders in dark green sweaters, children play in a small nursery school.

Its playfully coloured walls and maze of swings and slides stand in stark contrast with the lonely existence inside the prison blocks.

The little ones wander freely inside the prison compound for they have inherited their parents’ iniquities. On the backs of women in prison garb are strapped children too young to join nursery school.

Others lead toddlers and kindergarteners by the hand, playing with them in the dust or plopping them on their laps on prison benches.

Cheerful in their own world, the children do not know that they live in prison and a good number of them were born here.

More than 60 children under the age of four years live inside Lang’ata Prison. Their mothers are in for theft, drug trafficking, murder, kidnapping… name it.

Maria, a 30-year-old woman serving a 16-year stretch for killing her husband, says her two-year-old son thinks of the cell she shares with several other mothers and their children as home.

“He doesn’t know it is a prison,” she says, smiling sadly. “He thinks it is our house.”

It has been hard for Maria to be in high spirits. She swears that she did not kill her husband. But taking care of her son, Emmanuel, gives her life some meaning. “He motivates me to keep trying to improve myself,” she says.

According to most inmates (who, for personal reasons, declined to have their names revealed), there is nobody else to look after their children outside prison. Many fear that their children would be abused or even killed by the people they wronged.

You would expect children to be harmed by some inmates, but this rarely happens.

The children usually walk freely among them, as if protected by an invisible shield. It is as though they appeal to the collective maternal instinct of close to 700 inmates in the facility.

However, most mothers we talked to were living in dread of the day they would be separated from their children. This happens when the children turn four years.

“To whom can I send my child to live with?” wonders Maria, pointing out that her in-laws accused her of killing her husband.

She has completed about half of her 16-year-jail sentence. “I am worried about my son.”

Nancy, who is in for 10 years, says: “I think the best thing for my daughter would be for her to be outside with her grandmother. I have to take her to work with me.”

But there is the matter of the mother-child bond. “The truth is that I need her. She is very special to me and I know she is better off here than staying with relatives at home,” says Nancy.

Special she must be. A child in prison, says Nancy, “is like a breath of normal life inside the stifling confines of the prison. “It’s beautiful to have my daughter here, it keeps me busy”.

But woe unto mothers who find themselves penniless in jail and have to buy medicine for their sick children.

Selina, 32, is doing seven years for assault. She maintains that she was only ironing clothes in a house when the police stormed in and arrested her. Whatever the truth, she will have to give up her daughter, Trazy, in two years.

“The only thing that bothers me is that I will have to lose her,” she says as her baby clutches her white striped jumpsuit.

According to the officer in charge of Lang’ata Women’s Prison, Mrs Grace Odhiambo, the children have a calming effect on the inmates.

“They inspire mothers to learn skills or, in many cases, to kick the unlawful habits that landed them in trouble in the first place,” she says.

“The minors are highly valued by the prison community. The fact that we have children here creates a mind-set of solidarity. Everyone acts as if they could be their children and they don’t want anything bad to happen to them,” adds Mrs Odhiambo.

The daily life of the children here consists of waking up, roll call, eating, going to school, learning the three ‘R’s, and getting locked in again.

There are no views of the outside world, of the streets, the traffic, of people... of animals… There is no sense of “fun” that most children enjoy in the outside world.

But Mrs Odhiambo maintains that children in Lang’ata prison are enjoying their childhood, just like other children who live outside the prison.

“The children have access to education, medical treatment, free items, and learning materials distributed by the government and aid groups — which is more than what the average Kenyan child gets outside there,” she says.

However, some child experts argue that growing up in prison can make or break children, depending on the guidance they receive while the mother is incarcerated.

“In prison children have little opportunity to bond or form relationships with other family members, particularly their fathers, brothers, and sisters, and this may affect their up-bringing,” says Ms Mercy Wanjau of Angel Tree, an organisation that works together with Prison Fellowship International to help inmates.

According to Ms Wanjau, children living with their parents at the Lang’ata facility are better off than those in Machakos and Shimo la Tewa prisons.

A United Nations global report titled Violence Against Babies and Small Children Living in Prison with their Mothers says: “Prison is not a healthy environment for babies and young children. The mother is inevitably under stress, prisons tend to be noisy, and privacy is difficult. Stimulation is severely restricted. Many prisons holding babies and young children have few specially trained staff, poor play and exercise facilities, and the development of movement skills is restricted.”

The problem of parenting in prison, according to the report, often begins with childbirth. The number of babies born to mothers in prison is rising.

Most such women are said to be pregnant when they arrive and conjugal visits, as a rule, are not allowed. They generally give birth at the nearest hospital.

However, since most prisons are often far from hospitals and expectant mothers must clear various security hurdles, women inmates are at greater risk of delivering their babies before they can make it to a hospital.

After childbirth, the treatment is often no better. There are no special arrangements for the care of newborns in prison. After delivery, mothers and babies are typically separated — sometimes within hours.

In Kenya, the babies are sent to live with a family member or straight to foster care after four years.

While some critics argue that criminals make poor parents, experts say there is no doubt that separation from a parent, particularly a mother, affects a child’s psychological development.

“When a father is imprisoned, the mother typically cares for the children, but when a mother is incarcerated, the father often plays little or no role in raising the children left behind.

“Statistics show that children are five times more likely to end up in foster care when a mother is sent to prison than when a father is imprisoned,” says Dr Lukoye Atwoli, a consultant psychiatrist and lecturer at Moi University.

At Lang’ata, the cell doors open at 7 am and the guards call the roll at 8 am. Most of the mothers live together in the lower floors of cellblocks 3 and 4.

They take their children to school at 8.30 am and pick them up at 2.30 pm. The children spend the rest of the day in their mothers’ cells or the exercise yards.