A/74/136 sentenced to imprisonment for up to 25 years. The Independent Expert considers such lengthy prison sentences to violate the legal requirement of the “shortest appropriate period of time” under article 37 (b) of the Convention. 45. Children from poor and socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, migrant and indigenous communities, ethnic and religious minorities and the LGBTI community, as well as children with disabilities and, above all, boys, are largely overrepresented in detention and throughout judicial proceedings. 46. Overreliance on arrest and detention is also caused by a lack of re sources within the administration of justice. In many States, police officers, judges, prosecutors and prison guards lack specialized child-sensitive training, are underpaid and may be susceptible to corruption. Although children are guaranteed legal or ot her appropriate assistance in the preparation and presentation of their defence (Convention on the Rights of the Child, art. 40 (2) (b) (ii)), functioning State -funded legal aid systems are completely absent in 42 States. 47. Violence continues to be endemic at all stages of deprivation of liberty in the administration of justice. The resort to corporal punishment and other violent means of control and discipline, as well as the excessive use of restraint measures and solitary confinement, persist in many States. 48. Children consulted for the study specifically expressed concerns about the lack of child-sensitive procedures, lack of access to information, poor detention conditions and insufficient contact with family and the outside world. This confirms the Independent Expert’s own fact-finding experiences, as a former Special Rapporteur on torture that conditions of detention often amount to inhuman or degrading treatment in violation of international law. B. Children living in prisons with their primary caregivers 49. In most jurisdictions, provisions are made for infants and young children to accompany a primary caregiver, usually their mother, in prison. These children are deprived of their liberty de facto, albeit indirectly. The estimated number, from the questionnaire responses and other official statistics, is approximately 19,000 children per year. 50. The possibility for children to live in prison with a detained caregiver, is fraught with difficult considerations, beginning with the question o f whether to permit the practice at all, as both the exposure of the child to detention and the separation of the child from a primary caregiver have adverse consequences. 51. Article 30 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child of 199 0 requires States to ensure that “a mother shall not be imprisoned with her child ” and to “promote measures alternative to institutional confinement for the treatment of such mothers”. Similarly, and more gender-neutrally, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its general comment No. 14 (2013) on the right of the child to have his or her best interests taken as a primary consideration states that, “in cases where the parents or other primary caregivers commit an offence, alternatives to detention should be made available and applied on a case-by-case basis, with full consideration of the likely impact of different sentences on the best interests of the affected child or children”. It follows that the children affected shall be treated as right holders and not merely circumstantial victims of their caregiver ’s encounter with the criminal justice system; that the detention of primary caregivers should be avoided as much as possible; and that the balancing of interests be decided on a case -by-case basis. 52. State responses to the questionnaire show that most national laws establish specific age limits for a child’s admission into a place of detention (typically between two and six years of age) and place restrictions on the length of permissible stay. In 19-11838 11/23