The artist's comment

Beyond the dark wall and the iron bars, a warm light accentuates four boys of varying ages. Each one of them expresses a different interior response to his plight. Each has his own way of coping. From left to right: an appeal for help, despair, animosity, bravado.

Brother Rosaire Bergeron, volunteer minister until 1996 at Maroua prison in Cameroon, gives the following testimony:

“Many young people are in Maroua prison despite having violated no laws. They are innocent. They have been falsely accused and offered to the court, who sentenced them in substitution for the sons of the rich, or of military officers, or of influential politicians. I know personally of three such cases. They are refused trial or counsel to prevent the truth from getting out. What’s remarkable is that the three I know have pardoned their tormentors.

“For the smallest infractions, they are beat up or whipped. Sometimes they are suspended for hours upside down or chained to a high window frame in a dangerous or painful position in the burning sun where the others can see them, as a lesson.

“The food is outright insufficient and unpalatable: one lump of meal per day, as hard as a rock, with water. Health care is virtually nonexistent; there is no medicine. I have seen prisoners suffering from almost every possible illness: tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea, constipation, wounds from being beaten, depression, malnutrition, aids, cold, flu, appendicitis, dental infections. … Crowded together 40, 80, 120 to a cell, they have only enough space to stretch out side by side on the cement. The terminally ill are abandoned; there’s no doctor to be seen. All but naked, chained, waiting to die. You have to see it to believe it.”

Prospectus of André Coindre (1818) 

They are young prisoners who, after having been incarcerated for a more or less lengthy period, find that no one will give them work. Nevertheless, they are worthy of special concern. Guilty at an age when boys tend to be foolhardy rather than wicked, impetuous rather than incorrigible, it is vital that hope in their willingness to change not be lost. They must be afforded every possible help, and they must be isolated from exposure to criminal contagion.