Rehabilitation center helps keep ex-cons on straight and narrow

Rehabilitation center helps keep ex-cons on straight and narrow

Kafil Yamin, Inter Presse Service, Jakarta

Norman is a bus driver in Bogor and leads a happy life with his wife and two children. But his life was not always this tranquil or uneventful.

Jailed for two years after being convicted for robbery, Norman, who declined to give his full name, said he had not even been certain that he could ever have a normal life again.

"You know, it has never been easy for an ex-prisoner, criminals like me to get a job even after I have paid for my crime with long imprisonment," he said in an interview. "Society treats me badly. People always say, 'Be careful. He's an ex- prisoner'. And no company would accept an ex-prisoner.''

Lost and penniless after prison, Norman ended up going back to crime.

"The days after my release were days of war inside my mind. I tried very hard not to do bad things: robbing, stealing," he recalled. "But the stomach cannot wait. I could not get a job.''

Then, he heard about the At-Taibin rehabilitation center in Cibinong, some 80 kilometers from the capital Jakarta. He says the training and experience he got there gave him the means and skills to be reintegrated into society -- and get a job.

"After two years of training here, I found it easy to live as an ordinary person. People know I graduated from At-Taibin. But people accept me and some of them even offered me jobs," he recounted.

Today, there are many others who are trying to find their way back into society at the At-Taibin center, set up by Anton Medan, himself a well-known criminal in the 1980s -- and who knows very well the kind of life that At-Taibin's residents are trying to leave behind.

Some 200 men, all of them ex-prisoners, work in this rehabilitation center that also runs animal husbandry, a medical clinic and mechanics' services and construction businesses.

Apart from the people who work here and in the process undergoing skills and vocational training, thousands of others have graduated from At-Taibin and now work as drivers of public transport, food vendors and construction workers, among other occupations.

But it is a tough environment inside the center's premises. Anton himself can be heard shouting at the men inside.

"Why didn't you do what I have told you? Huh? How many times should I tell you about this?" he was heard yelling at a man who was working on breeding chickens.

But those like Zulmansyah, a new graduate of At-Taibin, said the center has done wonders for them.

As an army lieutenant, he was involved in drug trafficking, was discharged from the military and was jailed for four years.

After his release, friends told him about the foundation. There, he learned billboard-making and printing work for two years. Now he runs his own printing business.

Medan says the center, located on three hectares of land, may indeed be tough. But he stresses that it puts back humanity into its residents, not least by providing them a conducive environment quite different from the poor conditions in Indonesia's jails.

He said: "The situation of prisons in Indonesia is totally inhuman. Animals are treated much better. Prisoners are given stale steamed rice with a lot of water. Toilets and bathing rooms are terrible.

"Many prisoners have been left dead without a single media making news of it," he said in an interview.

Anton said the some money raised from At-Taibin has in fact been donated to prisons in the country. "We have sent TV sets to Bandung and Cirebon prisons. I know they don't have TV sets," he added.

No stranger to a life of crime and rejection, Anton during the 1980s was the most wanted criminal in Indonesia for various robbery cases. He robbed jewelry stores, banks and stole cars.

From 1974 to 1986, his deeds regularly made the headlines in Jakarta. Through the years until 1990, he was jailed eight times. Reports had it that he was involved in the gambling business and had links with the international gambling mafia.

Anton was raised in a Chinese-Indonesian Buddhist family in Medan, North Sumatra. During the anti-communist campaign in 1967, after the fall of Sukarno and the rise of the Soeharto government, his family, like many other Chinese-Indonesians, found itself excluded from economic rights.

Tan Hok Lian -- his original name -- had to sell cakes from village to village to help support his family. Poverty drove him to street life, and he became a criminal at 13.

In 1992, he converted to Islam, taking the name Anton Tabah. Since then, he has focused on helping, facilitating, and training ex-prisoners and criminals.

In pursuing this work, Anton said he has tried to maintain independence because the basic principle of At-Taibin is "from ex-prisoners, by ex-prisoners, for ex-prisoners". The center does not receive donations from outside.

"Regents, mayors and some ministers have come here to donate money. They say they are very concerned with us and want to help us. I say 'thank you, but we cannot accept it'," he added.

In 1994, he turned down an honorary doctorate for social and community development bestowed on him by a U.S. university. ''I am not and I can never become a doctor, even an honorary one. I can read a little and cannot write," he remarked.

Anton went to school for only eight months. He could not read and write -- until he became a criminal and learned to do these behind bars.

Ironically, prison gave him an opportunity to achieve what he could not before, and it is the same benefit he hopes the ex- prisoners will find at At-Taibin.