The Abovyan Criminal Detention Center is the only prison in Armenia for women and minors.  There are currently 126 women here, ages ranging from 19 to 77 years old.  36 of them are detainees.  The remaining 90 are convicts, serving their sentences in this prison.

Here one can find combinations of women living together where one has cruelly killed her own children, while the other is convicted of minor theft.

Edward Hovhannisyan, head of the Abovyan Detention Center, considered working with women more difficult, compared to his experience of working with men.  "You can take a man at his word. If he fails to keep a promise then you remind him of it and he feels bad as a man to have broken his word.  That doesn't work with women; they don’t take responsibility for what they say.  Women are rancorous, they bear grudges.  You can quarrel with a man, but it's forgotten once it's over.  But if you tell a woman convict something she doesn't like, then she will remember it for years."

According to the facility head, women convicts are also unique in the issues they face.  "For example, no male convict would ever say, 'Let me go home on September 1 so that I see my child off to school.'  That is what all the women here demand of us."

The women are occasionally given holidays from prison.  According to Hovhannisyan, this is done only in extraordinary circumstances, for example, serious illness to a relative of the convict or a death in the family as well as for social and psychological rehabilitation.  In all cases, the convict's behavior is the most important consideration while making a decision.

Nanasi Arakelyan is one of those rare convicts that the detention center has furloughed her model behavior.  She has been convicted on three charges, the last of which was human trafficking.

"When I returned from my vacation, everyone asked me what I had done during those seven days, where I had gone.  I told them, 'Where could I have gone? Could I have left my child's side at all?' I sat next to my child to satisfy my longing," she said.

"We are the ones who have been convicted, but the ones who suffer are our families and our children," said Satenik, "To put it crudely, we are at a cheap resort.  The ones who are suffering are our relatives, who don't know how to scrape together food or warm clothes for the winter to send to us."

Satenik had been sentenced to eight years imprisonment for selling drugs and had already served three years. "There is no justice.  If our statements have been extracted using force and blackmail, what is the point in a trial where the judge is only going to listen to such evidence? Do whatever you like, it won't help," she added.

In general, the women who tell the stories of how they ended up on this side of the barbed wire say that they were given harsher sentences than their crimes called for.  But their complaints are limited to the pre-trial process and the courts.  They do not speak freely of the prison, perhaps with the consideration that the issues they raised would be seen as complaints against the prison authorities.

The head of the prison, Edward Hovhannisyan, considered the main issue to be the employment of the women.  "A number of women in the same quarters is too much; there are constant quarrels over all sorts of domestic issues.  But if there were a production unit of some sort, then they would have work to do all the time and there would be less gossip and needless bickering, plus their sentences would pass by faster."

Today, only 16 women work in the housekeeping section of the prison and receive up to 20,000 drams as salary.

"If a woman could work in closed conditions and buy her children something with the money, then they would definitely work 'outside', if given the chance," said Narine and continued, "We weren't born criminals; social conditions turned us into them.  Let my country's government create jobs first, then come after us.  Otherwise, what we stole was just petty stuff, but we're the ones who are here - their robbery is huge, but they are outside enjoying it."

Narine has been convicted for theft on four occasions.  Because of her good behavior in prison, the authorities have recommended her candidacy for conditional early release to the interdepartmental committee on three occasions, but in vain.  After the last rejection, Narine declared a hunger strike.  But three days later, she ended the protest, frightened of "leaving her children on their own."

"Now I refuse to go before the committee.  I am sick and tired of those emotional moments.  I am waiting for my full sentence to be complete so that I can leave," she said.

The committee was formed through a presidential decree in July 2006.  Until then, each detention facility had their own committee to decide which prisoners deserved early release, after which they would intercede with a court and make the request.  Now the prison authorities present their "candidates" to the interdepartmental committee, and the latter decides whether or not to intercede in court.  This committee was created with the aim of decreasing the influence of corruption in the process.  But the convicts describe the committee's activity as "organizing a lottery with their lives".

"Not even 10 percent of the candidates we present to the presidential committee are approved," said the prison head and explained that the reason was a difference in their approaches.  "The convict's behavior is the most important thing for us.  But the independent committee looks at the charge for which the person has been convicted.  For example, if she is a drug addict, pimp or murderer, they reject the case."

It should be noted, however, that Hovhannisyan's statement is not entirely true.  In the year and a half of its existence, the independent committee - whose members are appointed by the President - has managed to approve the early release of convicts charged with the most serious of crimes and cold-blooded murders, while rejecting the cases of those charged with petty offences.

Suzy spent the years from 1999 to 2003 in the women's prison for robbing an apartment.  After her release, she lived in Balahovit and worked on an animal farm.  However, according to her, every time the municipal head saw her he would say, "Come to me and inform on other criminals - you were in prison a long time, you probably have criminal connections."  But Suzy refused.

"I had a Yezidi girlfriend.  I would always go to her house, or she would take her hairdryer and come to ours, and I would dry her hair," Suzy recalled.

In January 2006, the Court of First Instance in Abovyan sentenced her to 5.5 years imprisonment for stealing her friend's hairdryer, estimated to be worth only 5,000 drams.

"When the Yezidi found out that I was being tried, she came and asked for her charges to be retracted, saying, 'Nothing like that happened.  The municipal head came and told me to press charges against Suzy so that she would be brought to him.'  So there were no charges or complaints.  But they convicted me and took my child to an orphanage," said Suzy.  Her conviction was not appealed to a higher court because, in her words, she was "left on her own".

The presidential independent committee rejected Suzy's case for early release as well, without giving an explanation.  In general, the committee does not explain the reasoning behind any of its decisions.  Suzy no longer planned to appeal to the committee, "I have given up hope on everything," she said.

"When the decision to refuse release comes in, I am ashamed to present it to the convicts.  I tell my deputies to pass the bad news on to them," said the facility head.  "These people get very upset and disappointed.  Naturally, it influences their behavior as well.  The convicts behave well and work for the good of the prison so that they can get a positive character assessment from us.  That is necessary for their early release.  But after these rejections, they start to think, 'Well, if we're going to have to serve out our whole term, why should we do any work?'  There are people who no longer work," said prison head Hovhannisyan.

Note - All the convicts' names in the article except Nanasi Arakelyan's have been changed.