Camilo Soares, a leader in the Paraguayan youth movement and an Ashoka Fellow, launched Casa de la Juventud in 1994 to create a space for youth to gather and exchange ideas, art, and information freely; facilitate training of youth in leadership skills; and communicate the work of Paraguay's youth groups to the world. Today, Casa de la Juventud, is recognized nationally as a resource center for self-organized activities and initiatives of Paraguayuan youth.

In 1998, La Casa launched the publication of the book El Embudo, which focuses on the experiences and serious problems facing boys and adolescents in prison. Excerpts from El Embudo are presented here. This is a clandestine book, assembled over two years. It documents, through secret interviews and hidden-camera photographs, the abuse and neglect of kids in juvenile prisons.

"We started to look at the rural youth who come to the city, face miserable conditions, have no work and enter into prostitution or delinquency," explained Soares. "We're trying to stimulate a discussion on the concepts of justice – and how our society condones its own wrong doings."

El Embudo contains photographs and poetry by the boys themselves. It serves as both a photo exhibition and a work of drama in that the poems and images create a striking narrative.

According to Camilo, the aim of the work is to demystify the image of the "bad" or "evil" prisoner youth. It tries to demonstrate how our society, faced with so many problems, seeks out its scapegoats in order to justify itself, instead of attacking the problems at the heart.

"Our societies do what the classic movies do," Camilo said. "They make everything black or white, good or bad. In reality, though, it is not the 'delinquents' who are the victimizers, but rather the victims of a societal model that excludes and marginalizes them."

El Embudo currently is being exhibited around the country. Four European expositions are slated for Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and France.

Prison, as it exists now, is nothing more than a punishment and arbitrary imposition that does not seek to facilitate learning in any way. It has as its only objective that the prisoners suffer, feel bad, and experience humiliation. It constitutes nothing more than a reprisal.

To imprison someone in the Panchito Lopez Prison (before it was called Ambush, and later, who knows what other sinister name...) is, definitively, an act of vengeance that society commits against those that cannot respond to this punishment.

They, the precocious prisoners, do nothing more than satisfy one social group's need for vengeance; that must exorcise its profoundest demons in order to sleep more peacefully each night. Because society is afraid. And very rancorous. But very rarely is this vengeful anxiety directed towards the cause of its ills. Most of the time, these sadistic exercises of destruction are carried out on the weakest people of all, the ones that cannot respond to these acts of vengeance, the throw-aways that matter to no one (or to very few).

Y.K. Brown was right: Prison for minors is no hotel, and the boys aren't there to have themselves a vacation, but rather to satisfy the cruelty of society.

This is the only way to understand the images of this "Funnel."

© Casa de la Juventud
    Paraguay