Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: Adorned by brightly colored walls, dotted with children’s drawing, the courtyard of the Fanar Juvenile Correction Facility looks uncannily like a school.
Four teenage boys in the courtyard play table tennis, while others dressed in Ralph Lauren logo jumpers hang from balconies or walk in and out of rooms as teachers and visitors shuffle around freely. When the intermission comes, more boys appear, making their way from either English or Arabic classes, to woodwork, metalwork, design or electronics workshops.
The atmosphere in the four-storey building is relaxed, even friendly, and looking out over panoramic views of Beirut below one could almost be forgiven for forgetting the setting, before being jolted back to reality by the swirls of barbed wire clinging to the gates.
No amount of sugar coating can cover the fact that the 40-plus boys, lodged at Fanar Juvenile Correction Facility, are sent there very much against their will for crimes ranging from petty theft to murder.
“I’m here because I killed another boy,” explained Zein, 16, as his otherwise enthusiastic eyes drop to the floor. “It was an accident but now I am here and I don’t know how long I will stay.”
“I miss my family often,” Zein said.
But the moment of sadness quickly passes as Zein begins to talk about his time at Fanar. “Being here is very much like being in school. I like to study and I am working for my Brevet,” he said. “My father is the town mayor and my eldest brother is in the army.”
“I want to make them proud, so after the 9th grade official exam I am going to start work on the Baccalaureate.”
“We encourage the boys to learn and support those that want to pursue their studies,” said facility director Hussein Salman. “However, at this age most do not want to study and are far more interested in learning professions and crafts.
“They get very into these. At the moment we have a project on how to assemble a car which has caused a lot of the boys to get very involved.”
The purpose of the activities, like all other services offered at Fanar, is to give the delinquents the best possible chance to start afresh and break from the vicious cycle which caused many to offend.
“Most of the boys come from troubled backgrounds, where the family structure has been severely disrupted because of problems like poverty, violence or divorce,” said Dr. Robert Caracache, head psychologist at the institute who also runs its social services and educational divisions.
“The families are the underlying cause and the delinquents are always the victims of this. When the normal support structure doesn’t exist it is substituted by the streets that step in to fill the void and this is where children come under the wrong kind of influence.”
Looked at in this light, the juveniles are treated much more like students, rather than criminals. They are never beaten and the security levels are kept to a minimum to encourage trust, an approach seen as key in rehabilitation.
“I judge our success by the low rate of [reoffending], and I would say only around 5 percent of the boys come back to the facility,” said Caracache.
This is significantly lower than prisons where young offenders are pushed into joining gangs and can pick up criminal practices from others, he explained.
Success, however, depends on the length of time that boys spend in Fanar and their general openness to the ideas being promoted there.
“It is difficult when you get children who come from parts of the country where drug smuggling – for example – is prevalent and their father, uncle and brother and neighbor will all be involved in this,” said Caracache. “They don’t understand why what they have done is wrong and simply count themselves ‘unlucky’ for being caught.
“Sometimes we have a very short time to work with the child, but when we have a few months we can get to the root causes of why they committed the crime and help them alter their behavior … building up their moral concept of good and evil.”
All the young offenders are subjected to two mandatory psychotherapy sessions each week, with extra attention offered to those suffering from violence-related trauma or other issues.
The social workers at the facility also work with the families to try and assure the juveniles return to a safer and more hospitable environment. Families are even allowed weekly visits and care is taken to not return children to households where they may be at risk.
“I have not let my family visit me here but I am eager to get back to them,” said 16-year-old Ahmad who is due for release in less than two weeks. “During my [eight months] here I have taken cooking workshops and now I want to get a job in a restaurant.”
But with his eldest brother doing time in Roumieh prison and his mother struggling to raise his five other siblings alone since her divorce, Ahmad knows he will have a difficult time ahead.
“I don’t expect anyone will help me but I am determined to find work so that I can help support my mother,” he said.
Luckily, with the many contacts Fanar has developed since opening its doors in 1936, the facility has some scope to arrange work for those coming to the end of their sentence. But the boys who come out of Fanar are only a tiny fraction of those needing help, with many more falling between the cracks.
“We are the only facility of this kind in Lebanon, and while presently we have the capacity for about 40, some 100 juveniles are currently in Roumieh prison,” said Caracache. “In my good conscience I would say that there are two, or even three times as many children out there that are in need [of Fanar’s services].”
Fanar prioritizes space for the youngest offenders and those convicted of the lightest crimes but does not admit anyone charged with drug-related activities, with drug offenders almost always shepherded off to Roumieh, Lebanon’s highest security prison where conditions remain notoriously harsh despite recent reforms.
This has created a “sad” situation where there are some 13 and 14-year-olds in Roumieh, explained Fanar councilor Abeer al-Hajj who makes weekly trips to the prison to assess if any vulnerable juveniles are in dire need of a transferred to Fanar.
Since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when the facility held more than double the number of young offenders, shrinking funding levels have hit Fanar hard. Surviving off handouts from the Justice Ministry and occasional boosts from the Social Affairs Ministry, the national facility is forced to seek private funding to stay afloat. Continued support from the Lebanese Union for the Protection of Children, in addition to help from other non-governmental organizations has helped the institution slowly build itself back up to its former standards, once considered the best in the Middle East, but progress remains slow.
“We used to have plans to get a correction facility in each one of the regions but at the moment this is just a long-term dream,” said Caracache.
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