Major contrasts in views on minor misdemeanours

Unlike my colleagues from the Washington Post and the New York Times, who believed he would suffer some sort of lifelong physical or emotional trauma, I felt little sympathy for an 18-year-old punk who had such little regard for other people’s property.

Perhaps it also had something to do with the fact that as a high-school student, I was often caned for various infractions. I’m sure the Singapore practitioner had a certain expertise my teachers didn’t, but apart from stinging like hell and leaving a patchwork of red welts across my backside, “six of the best” didn’t ruin my life.

In the end, with American president Bill Clinton pleading for leniency, Fay got four strokes instead of six, and went back to the United States none the worse for his ordeal. He was later arrested for beating up his father and, predictably, for drug possession.

Now we have been subjected to the same sort of hand-wringing over the fate of a sturdily-built 14-year-old Australian, who has now flown home after serving two months in confinement in Indonesia for possession of 3.6 grams of marijuana.

Didn’t we have this media circus with Australian beautician Schapelle Corby, jailed for 20 years in 2005 for cannabis possession? In her case, Australians were widely convinced she had been framed. With the so-called “Bali Boy”, it is his tender age.

Granted, a kid barely out of puberty doesn’t belong in jail, but two retired US Drug Enforcement Administration agents I know say his lawyers are talking nonsense in asserting he is “addicted” to marijuana [in order to lessent the punishment]. Marijuana isn’t heroin or cocaine. No one gets “addicted” to what, after all, is a soft drug. If he is a habitual user, as appears more likely, then why didn’t the media spend more time questioning the quality of his upbringing?

Where were his parents in all this? They promised to send the boy to a drug rehabilitation centre. Perhaps they need some counselling themselves, considering the boy had already twice been cautioned by the New South Wales police for drug use over the previous 18 months.

After all, Australian medical researchers in a report last year found that teenagers who use marijuana before the age of 17 are two to five times more likely to graduate to harder drugs or alcohol abuse in later life.

Bali may be a tourist paradise, but it isn’t the mall down the street. It is part of a foreign country where the laws are often draconian and buying drugs in the street is an invitation to being caught up in a sting operation. It is the oldest police trick in the book. Instead, we were subjected to reports that mum and dad had been approached to sell their errant son’s story to a television channel for US$298,000 – a purported deal that could have affected the outcome of the trial.

If we have learnt anything, it was that Corby’s heavy sentence was due in no small part to the court’s annoyance at the Australian media’s contention that the daughter of a long-time drug-dealer could not possibly be guilty of anything – at least in Indonesia. Former Australian officials warned that for all the commendably sensitive way the Indonesians handled the boy’s case, nothing offends them [the Indonesian authorities] more than over-bearing white foreigners telling them what to do.

Conspiracy theorists suspect Indonesia may have also been sending Canberra a not-so-subtle message about the fate of 40 to 50 Indonesian boys languishing in Australian jails on people-smuggling charges. The uneducated offspring of dirt-poor families, with some as young as 13, most were crewmen on small, hired fishing boats intercepted while carrying asylum-seekers from Indonesia to Australia.

Unlike the Australian boy, who even had Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd personally involved in his case, the Indonesian boys have often been detained in adult prisons, unable to communicate in English and with little or no consular help.

While it was Australian journalists and lawyers who drew public attention to the hypocrisy that attends their confinement, Indonesian diplomats had already been quietly talking to Canberra about the issue. Since his appointment in 2009, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa has noticeably spent a lot more time than his predecessors attending to the welfare of the country’s often-brutalised maids and other citizens in trouble abroad.

Some of the Indonesian boys in Australia have been held for 14 months or more. In many cases, their families have had little idea what happened to them, resigned to believing that they had been lost at sea. For coastal communities, such tragedies are not uncommon.

International experts have largely discredited the Australian police use of controversial wrist X-rays to determine the age of the youths, but officials claim that where the results are inconclusive they should be given the benefit of the doubt and returned home.

Perhaps now, some thought will be given to the stark comparison between the behaviour of spoiled boys from affluent families – and those from a developing country forced into work at puberty and who end up in a foreign jail through no fault of their own.