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Improving life for children in Bolivian jails

Cecilia Uribe De Chavez is working to change the Bolivian prison system, so kids don't have to grow up with their incarcerated parents.

With nowhere else to go, thousands of Bolivian children end up living in prison with their incarcerated parents.

Photo: David Mercado / Reuters

In 2005, Cecilia Uribe de Chavez, a pediatrician working in the Bolivian prison system, was fed up. The country’s prisons were full, not only of inmates, but their undernourished and uneducated children. Centro de Orientación Feminina de Obrajes,the only prison in La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia, that houses female inmates, routinely takes in convicts’ children up to 6 years old who’d otherwise be left to the streets. Families crowd into minuscule cells; rations intended for one person have to feed several. Uribe and her fellow pediatricians decided things had to change, so they founded Children Living in Jails.

Uribe, with pediatrician Inge von Alvensleben, psychologist Sussy Portugal and social worker Miralge Oporto, developed a comprehensive care program for the children, including medical, psychological and social support. Along with offering health care, Uribe and company organize games, reading circles and coloring time to keep the kids engaged. Seminars are given on nutrition for mothers. Uribe’s “idea was to raise the profile of the situation of these street children,” says David Tozer, development manager at San Francisco-based Child Family Health International (CFHI), one of the program’s financial partners. “In La Paz, at least, there is no system for orphaned children. These kids don’t have any other option but to go to prison, too.”

Since 2006, the four have helped some 150 children at the prison. “The mothers feel our commitment to their children,” says Von Alvensleben. “Because of the genuine interest we take in their lives, they feel more committed too, changing their attitudes with respect to caring for their children positively.”