TORTURE AND ILL-TREATMENT OF CHILDREN IN UKRAINE

Section 4Torture and ill-treatment of children in the context of juvenile justicethe assortment of products and their prices in the prison shop. He consideredthat he had been lucky since he had a profession and was employedin qualified building work. On the money earned, around 200 UAH a month,he could afford to buy 20 tins of preserves with a little left over. Other respondentssaid that minimum amounts were paid in the colony, however ifyou wanted to eat you’d work even for those amounts, with the motivationof working in order to have enough to eat being considered typical for thecolony. Of course in such a situation it is not exactly realistic to be releasedwith at least an amount of money sufficient for a month’s modest living in theoutside world.• Life after releasePeople released from the colony pointed to the positive role of the educationthey received in the colony. This might be both the school certificate anda trade enabling them to support themselves. However after their release onlysome were able to find work by themselves or through state employmentservices. The respondents complained that as people with criminal recordsthey were ordered bad, low-paid jobs which didn’t earn them enough evenfor a modest existence. Those who were able to find a good or at least satisfactoryjob said that this was thanks to their relatives or friends, includingothers released from the corrective colony. We should note that the social tiesformed in places of confinement only sometimes lead to the creation of criminalgangs or repeat offending. These may also be normal human relations,friendship and mutual assistance.Those released from SIZO asserted much more often that they had onlylost time and / or partially damaged their health. Holding a minor in SIZO fora long period can hardly be viewed as something that promotes their re-educationor reform; the results are more likely to be socio-political loss of adaptationand post-traumatic syndrome which altogether give somewhat lesschance of returning to normal life.In our opinion, the percentage of repeat offences is an important indicatorof the effectiveness of the penal system however it needs to be supplementedwith other factors. For example, the colony administration and PenitentiaryService as a whole are not able to exert any control of the social conditionswhich the released former prisoners find themselves in. There is also a fairlycomplicated issue of how much and in what specifically contacts should be147