UPDATE: Interview of a Mexican teenager who grew up in prison
Interview by Fernanda de Szyszlo, BBC News
What was it like to spend the first six years of your life in prison?
I feel like I was robbed of my innocence. Growing up in prison, I didn’t have a normal childhood. Not even close. I felt like I was paying for my mother’s crimes. They made me feel guilty.
Yes. The prison guards. They treated us like criminals and we couldn’t understand why. We kept asking ourselves, what is our crime? If we didn’t obey their rules, they punished us. We were always terrified. They yelled. They kicked us. They punched us. If they wanted to, they could make us go hungry for days.
Tell us about a normal day in prison.
The guards would wake us up at the same time as the inmates. Sometimes we’d get breakfast. Sometimes… we wouldn’t. They didn’t have food for babies. We just ate whatever they had cooked for our mothers that day. As a result, we got sick frequently. Then, they would just leave us in the nursery. We were barely supervised. No one took care of us. We had nothing to do. We hardly had any toys, and the ones we had were old and broken. We slept in mattresses, together, because there were no cribs.
Did you receive any kind of education?
No. I didn’t learn how to read until I got out of prison. I was about seven or eight when I went to school for the first time. On the first day, I was terrified because I was expecting my teachers to be violent, like the prison guards. I thought that violence was normal. I didn’t understand why the teacher was being nice to me. I kept waiting for her to start yelling, or to hit us. Thankfully, she never did. I remember feeling like an alien. I realised I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t relate to any of my classmates. I couldn’t count. I didn’t know the days of the week. That was when I truly noticed how damaging my childhood had been. I never really recovered from it. I still flinch when someone raises his or her voice.
