WITNESS: Gaining the trust of mothers in an Argentine prison

Carolina Camps, 34, is a freelance photographer based in Argentina who develops her own documentary projects, often focused on people at society's margins. She has worked with Reuters and leading Argentine newspapers such as Clarin and La Nacion. In the following story she relates her experiences of getting close enough to women prisoners in La Plata, Argentina, to portray their lives through her images.

By Carolina Camps

LA PLATA, Argentina (Reuters) - "My stepfather raped me when I was a child. I remember that he always hit me hard on the head. My mom always said that I lied. Then I got engaged to be married and left home. He also hit me...I don't know why but one day I killed him."

This was the first story Maria de los Angeles told me in the psychiatric ward of Prison 33. She takes medicine five times a day, doesn't know how many years she's been in jail, or how many she has left.

She only knows that in this place she feels protected, that life outside wouldn't treat her any better and that nobody is waiting for her release.

In December 2004, I started work on a photo essay at Prison 33 in La Plata, southeast of Buenos Aires. I chose a women's jail because I believed it would be easier for me to get closer to the prisoners, listen to their stories and get to know them.

I was very curious to see what life was like in jail and what sort of women ended up in there.

I had a lot of prejudices when I began, but something changed. I stopped seeing and started observing, and I stopped being a free person and started to become one of them.

The bars, the prisoners, the feeling of being locked up, the punishment -- I didn't want that to show through my pictures.

The prison holds hundreds of sad stories, stories of abandonment, of mistreatment. I wanted to speak about these women just as I saw them, just as they showed themselves, just as they are.

MOTHERHOOD

Last year, in the second phase of my project, I worked in the maternity wards where 63 children up to four years old live together with prisoners.

The children were born in prison and have never seen daylight outside the bars. They don't know what an animal or a car is, or what exists outside this lockup. They are children that don't smile.

I was saddened to hear that the first word they learn is "celadora" (prison guard) and to see how their mothers used their teeth to cut food for them for the lack of a knife.

For those whose mothers are in prison for years, the arrival of a fourth birthday is the most painful day because the children must leave to live with their family outside, if they have one, or in a state home if they do not.

The vast majority jailed at Prison 33 are there pending trial; they haven't been convicted of a crime. In Buenos Aires' provincial prisons, about 12 percent of 780 female prisoners are pregnant or already living with their children behind bars.