The Daily Star | Normal life elusive for most female ex-cons

BEIRUT: On Christmas Eve last year, Sara crossed the threshold of the prison that had been her home for nearly 12 years. She stopped, found that she couldn’t move any further, and started to cry.

The social worker who was there to pick her up asked Sara what was wrong. “I never saw outside like this. Everything I know is inside,” she responded.

“Of course, I was happy, but at the same time, I was scared,” says Sara, who is in her early 50s and whose name has been changed at her request.

With no relatives to pick her up and few options ahead of her, Sara’s situation resembles that of many female ex-prisoners who struggle to find somewhere to live once they leave prison.

The female prison population is relatively small, totaling around 300 in 2017 - just under 5 percent of Lebanon’s total prison population, according to statistics from the London-based online database World Prison Brief.

Data provided to The Daily Star by Dar al-Amal, the NGO that picked Sara up from the prison, suggests that in 2018, less than half of the 351 women who left Lebanon’s three women’s prisons were able to find accommodation with their families and only seven were able to register in a shelter. Eighty-five were unable to find permanent accommodation.

Prison had been Sara’s home since 2007, when she was jailed for having killed her physically abusive husband. For a long time she put up with it: “I just thought all men were like that with their families,” she says. But when her husband began to sexually abuse her daughter, she finally snapped, and with her son, shot her husband with his own hunting rifle.

“When I first went in I was weak and scared. Scared of the prison, scared of everybody,” she recalls. Initially, her extended family and some friends would come to visit. “With time, their kids were growing up ... [and with] work, illness - no one came anymore.”

Eventually, her closest companions were her fellow prisoners. “I saw them for 12 years, more than I saw my sisters. I knew what they were thinking, I knew what they liked ... when they were angry, when they were happy,” she says.

After she was released late last year, few of Sara’s relatives would talk to her, still less her friends. Fortunately, one of her sisters agreed to put her up temporarily, until she can find somewhere more permanent.

In that sense, Sara is more fortunate than those who cannot find a place to stay with family. “One of the problems female prisoners face is that they don’t have a house. They get out of prison and they have nowhere to go. In Lebanon, not all the [women’s] shelters accept women who have been in prison,” says Salam Moghrebi, a social worker specializing in social reintegration for Dar al-Amal.

Shelters are not a realistic solution for the vast majority of women. Jihane Isseid, the Emergency Safe Housing program manager for women’s rights NGO ABAAD, which runs three shelters across the country, says that the organization has to place strict criteria on the women it offers accommodation.

The shelters do not accept women unless they are at a “high risk of being killed or facing other kinds of GBV [gender-based violence] and she doesn’t have any other solution. Shelter should be the last resort,” Isseid says.

Due to the risks they face, residents are not allowed to leave the shelters unsupervised.

The government does not run its own shelters or offer any of its own support services for ex-prisoners. The Social Affairs Ministry instead outsources such services to local NGOs such as Dar al-Amal or ABAAD.

It’s a situation that Isseid believes should change: “If the government took initiative and built its own [programs] ... it’s more sustainable,” she says. The ministry did not respond to The Daily Star’s requests for comment.

Even those who are welcomed back into their immediate family circle may find that the stigma associated with having been in prison still has ramifications. Nouhad (not her real name), a woman in her late 30s, was released from prison last October. She served just over two years for theft, a crime she maintains she didn’t commit. While she was inside, her husband and four children visited regularly, and she now lives with them. She is able to rely financially on her husband, who earns just over LL1 million ($666) a month as a driver.

Although she tried to keep it a secret, someone in her neighborhood eventually spread the rumor that Nouhad had been in prison, and her life changed.

“When they see someone who was in prison, they look at them with a different perspective,” she says. The hostility grew to such an extent that the family was forced to move to a neighborhood where her past remains hidden. Now, Nouhad rarely leaves the home. “I’ll go out [only] if I need to get some food ... I became scared of people a lot.”

But for those unable to rely financially on their families after prison, the social stigma can prevent them from finding employment and sustaining themselves economically. “We are in contact with employers, asking them for a job even at the minimum salary to cover [the women’s] basic needs,” says Hoda Kara, director of Dar al-Amal. “Most of them don’t want to. They say, ‘Why should I take this risk because after all, she was in prison?’”

While her sister has so far been hospitable, Sara knows that she cannot stay with her forever. Her sister’s husband is unwell and spends all day at home. He “wants the freedom of his house,” Sara says. With only two rooms, there is little space for her.

She hopes one day to be able to live with her children again. “I don’t ask for anything more than that,” she says. “That’s my dream.”

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 07, 2019, on page 3.