Because China's Criminal Law states that pregnant or breastfeeding women could post bail in lieu of spending time in jail for humanitarian reasons, the rule is being abused. Although the law also provides that repeat offenders would still be arrested and detained, lack of adequate social services for their children prevents authorities from enforcing that.
As a result, major drug dealers are encouraging their women friends who are working as drug mules to get pregnant to avoid jail, according to Wei Yuqing, a police officer in Gulou District, Nanjing. Ji Shengzhi, director of the anti-drug police squad in Nanjing, adds, "The humanitarian leeway has been used by drug traffickers as loophole. They use their own children to defy legal punishment."
Serving as a "model" of female drug mules is 35-year-old Zhi Hui who was arrested by Jiangsu police in June 2014. The single mother of three was pregnant with her oldest child during her first arrest in 2011 for possessing 150 grams of meth and heroine.
During her first arrest, the police told her she could post bail and serve time at home. "Then after a year I accidentally became pregnant again. I needed to make money to raise my children, so I had a third baby to stay away from jail and sustain my drug business," Xinhua quotes Zhi, also known as "Sister Hui" in drug circles.
Her strategy is working because from 2011 through 2015, Zhi was arrested but always released on bail five times. She accounts for 20 percent of all the drugs confiscated by Chinese police yearly. In 2015, eight other drug-dealing mothers were arrested, with a total of 25.9 kilos of drugs.
Ji is pushing for their punishment for other pregnant women not to imitate them, especially since civil affairs departments were mandated in January 2015 to put up institutions that would temporarily take custody of kids of drug-dealing mothers and find foster families for the children. But other bureaucratic blocks such as lack of funds, manpower and venues have been preventing its full implementation.
But the law is tougher on foreign drug mules with several Filipinas, who were not pregnant when apprehended, executed by China.
However, it seems the policy is different in Hong Kong where 30-year-old Vergara Catherine Bustillo, a Filipino customer service representative in Manila who came to the former Crown Colony to buy clothes for her forthcoming baby, was caught with 1.3 kilos of cocaine. In December, she was sentenced to 14 years and 8 months by the High Court, reports The South China Morning Post.
Justice Kevin Zervos says he was lenient to Bustillo who claims she was just asked by a woman to carry a suitcase before she boarded a plane for Hong Kong. While Hong Kong's Correctional Service Department allows women inmates to take care of their baby until the newborn reaches three years old, Bustillo preferred to send the son she would give birth to while in jail to the baby's father in the Philippines.