COLUMN ONE : Jail Torment for Children in S. Africa : Held in adult prisons, black and mixed-race boys as young as 10 are beaten and raped by older youths or ‘sold’ to male inmates. Most are runaways arrested for minor offenses.

Morne Rudolph, a 13-year-old black street urchin, was sleeping in a storefront doorway here when the police arrested him for “strolling,” or loitering, and tossed him into Pollsmoor, one of South Africa’s most notorious maximum-security adult prisons.

For four weeks, while waiting for his court date, Morne slept on the crowded concrete floors of a communal cell and was raped repeatedly by older youths.

“When I said I didn’t want to do it, they took a tin coffee mug and banged it against my head to force me,” Morne said recently, tears welling in his eyes. “I tried to push the button to call the guards, but they (the attackers) stopped me. I was afraid to tell. If I told, they would beat me.”

Morne later was released without charge--another battered and bruised victim of a little-known legacy of South Africa’s notorious system of apartheid.

Every month, hundreds of black children under 18, including both African and mixed-race Colored children such as Morne, are sent into adult prisons across South Africa while they wait weeks and even months for their trials.

Once they are convicted and sentenced, the youths are moved to juvenile detention centers. But until then, they are kept in adult prisons that have no facilities for youngsters.

Children as young as 10 are held in prison cells with up to 50 other youths of all ages. Once or twice a week, depending on the whim of the prison guards, they are allowed to play in the prison yard. If they can come up with enough money, they can pass the long days watching television on sets rented from the guards.

Some, like Morne, are raped by older children. Others are taken into the adult prison cells and “sold” to inmates for sex; the going rate is as low as 5 rand (about $1.65) a night. And youth gangs, with names like the Scorpions and the Hard Living Kids, operate freely.

“The conditions for children are just horrific,” said Michelle Morris, a former New York corporate lawyer who now heads the Youth Advocacy Unit at the University of the Western Cape. “Every child we talk to in those prisons begs us to get him out.”

Morne’s best friend, 15-year-old Nico Louw, also spent a few weeks of his young life inside Pollsmoor.

“When they locked the cell at night, the fighting would start,” Nico said. “If you get food or clothes from your relatives, they would fight over them. And if you didn’t cooperate, you were beaten.”

Adriaan Vlok, President Frederik W. de Klerk’s minister of corrections, said recently that the government was “extremely concerned about the number of children in (adult) prisons.” But, other than ordering a report on the problem, prison officials have so far taken no action to keep youths out of adult jails.

In November, the prison service counted 2,656 children under 18 awaiting trial in adult prisons countrywide. Earlier this year, the figure was 4,000. And human rights lawyers estimate that as many as 12,000 children have been held in adult prisons for varying periods so far this year.

Only 5% of those children have been arrested on serious crimes, lawyers say. Most, like Morne, are runaways who live on the streets, beg spare change from passersby and routinely get arrested for petty offenses such as loitering, drunkenness or shoplifting.

The judicial system works nicely for arrested white children in South Africa. Most are released into the custody of their parents, and the remainder are sent to halfway houses, known as “places of safety,” that resemble schools more closely than prisons.

But halfway houses reserved for blacks are overcrowded and understaffed. And, because escapes are common, many judges prefer that arrested children await their court dates in adult prisons.

By law, youths must appear in court within 48 hours of their arrest. But judges often send them back to prison until their parents are located. In the case of black children, especially street kids, that can take weeks or months because few of their parents have telephones.

In the United States, by contrast, children are provided immediate legal representation, and most are released on bail to their parents or moved to juvenile centers while they await trial. A child arrested for a minor offense is rarely held overnight in a prison cell.

But South African law does not provide free attorneys for either juvenile or adult defendants.

“Nobody wants these children in the prisons. We’re all agreed on that,” said Annette Cockburn, director of the Homestead, a program for street children in Cape Town. “But when they are arrested, they enter into a kind of limbo.”

Youths are kept together in 30-by-10-foot cells with a single open toilet and shower. They sleep on floor mats with one blanket, which is often infested with fleas or lice. If they wet the mats at night, as many of the children do, the cloth is laid out to dry and used again the next night.

Prisons do not have clothing for the children, and there are no social workers or educational facilities. One child recently was denied crayons on the grounds that he might stab someone with them.

About 12,000 street children such as Morne Rudolph live in a nether world. They are ignored for much of the year in Cape Town, but police round them up during the holiday season, which is beginning now, to keep them out of sight of the tourists.

That’s when many end up in Pollsmoor, the prison where Nelson Mandela and other black political leaders spent much of the 1980s.

Gerardus Vervaart, who runs a halfway house for mixed-race Colored children, says he sees more behavioral problems in the children who come to his facility from Pollsmoor.

“Pollsmoor has a great impact on the child,” Vervaart said. “They’re in a situation where they’re not an individual. It’s more difficult for these boys to open up emotionally. And they tend to be more aggressive.”

Unlike the drug-addicted street kids found in major U.S. cities, most of South Africa’s street children are not yet hardened criminals. “They just need love and attention,” said Cockburn of the Homestead program.

One of the children in Cockburn’s program is Kenneth, a 16-year-old runaway who recently was released from Pollsmoor.

He was kept in the communal cells for four months until his case--a charge of purse-snatching--came to trial. Kenneth said he saw many children beaten and raped by older youths. On occasion, after dark, children were delivered to adult inmates for sex, with the guards collecting from 5 rand ($1.65) to 20 rand ($6.60) for the service.

“The first time someone comes to prison, he is beaten up almost every day until he joins a gang for protection,” Kenneth said. “I saw many guys who were used for sex. You don’t have to agree. They will force you.”

Morne Rudolph has been in and out of Pollsmoor four times since he moved out of his mother’s home when he was 10. Now he is being held in Vervaart’s halfway house, Bonnietown, which shelters 150 children under 18 who are awaiting trial in Cape Town.

At Bonnietown, the kids are supervised by social workers. They sleep on beds, attend school classes and play daily in the courtyard. None of the staff is armed.

“Up to now, judges have been reluctant to send kids to ‘places of safety’ like this because their priority is to get the child back into court,” Vervaart said. “We try, but we are not a jail.” About 140 children escape from Bonnietown every year.

At 13, Morne hardly looks like a candidate for adult prison life. A tiny lad with a lopsided grin and large ears, his growth was stunted at birth by his mother’s alcoholism, social workers say.

During an interview, he wore a pair of black dress shoes without socks and wiggled his skinny legs together nervously.

Morne said he cannot understand why he was arrested in the first place. “I didn’t commit any crimes,” he said. “I was just ‘strolling.’ ” A social worker describes Morne and his friend Nico as “incorrigible strollers” who lived on the streets and begged for money.

Morne vividly remembers the sexual attacks on him in prison. His attackers were large boys, he said, reaching an arm high above his head to show their size. Sometimes, he was attacked by three youths at a time. If he fought back, he said, they would start a small fire with paper scraps and burn his feet until he agreed.

Nico, a chunky Colored child in cutoff shorts, was sent to Pollsmoor when he was arrested for stealing a car. The charges were later dropped.

Nico said he wasn’t raped, but he remembers watching such attacks, often as many as four each night.

“I didn’t want to interfere,” he said. “Sometimes, people would do it voluntarily. But if you didn’t want to, they would cut you with a blade.”

These days the boys’ biggest fear is that they’ll end up in Pollsmoor again.

“We don’t want to go back there,” Nico said. “It’s not a place for a child. And I still feel like a child.”

Kraft, The Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief, is currently on assignment in Somalia.