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At 13, Shabano is as self-conscious and awkward as any teenaged girl. She laughs shyly when asked personal questions and nervously chips at the orange nail polish that can't hide her grimy nails.

But Shabano, like the other “women” prisoners in the Kandahar district jail, has adult-sized problems. Two months ago, she was jailed for running away from an arranged marriage with a 50-year-old man, a deal negotiated by her father before his death. Home for her now is a dark cell containing nothing but a filthy mattress folded up and stacked against the concrete wall.

Shabano has been locked up for breaking her father's deal, an exchange that horrified the girl who refers to her former fiancé simply as “the old man.”

“I don't want to spend my life with this old man,” she said, scrunching her nose in disgust. And then in a burst of anger, she launched into a diatribe against her country's ancient custom of arranging marriages for young girls.

“We don't have democracy in this country if someone wants a love marriage,” she said. “My father exchanged me for another girl.”When her father gave her to the 50-year-old man, he returned the gift by offering his own teenager to Shabano's father.

Shabano is one of the 16 adult female inmates at the Kandahar jail, which houses 750 prisoners, among them children and political prisoners. The women and their 18 children are housed in a separate compound. Their doorless rooms face an outdoor quadrant filled with dirt and weeds.

The children range in age from toddlers to a poised 10-year-old girl named Mash Kan, who arrived at the prison several months ago with her mother, who was accused of prostitution.

A common thread runs through most of the female inmates' stories: Most are behind bars for defying their husband or his family, to whom the wife is beholden after marriage.

Three of the imprisoned women killed their husbands. One, 16-year-old Azizah, strangled her husband's sister with a scarf three years ago.

“All the time she was beating me,” Azizah said, seated cross-legged on the floor of a cell, her two-year-old daughter on her lap. There is no regret or emotion on her round face. “She was a bad lady. My husband and his sister beat me all the time.”

While Azizah's crime of homicide is a serious one anywhere in the world, many of the other inmates' infractions can't be found in the criminal codes of most Western countries. Nor do these crimes of disobedience appear in Afghanistan's new constitution.

During the Taliban years, Afghanistan's prisons were notorious warehouses for men and women who disobeyed the regime's repressive rules, which included anything from a woman wearing the wrong colour of socks to laughing on the street.

That regime fell in 2001, but Afghanistan is still largely ruled by ancient customs which, among other things, govern the conduct and expectations of women and girls. The practice of trading young girls for marriage is more widespread among poor and uneducated families, where girls are used as a form of currency.

Azizah said she was married at age 12 to her older husband in a deal arranged by her father.

Recently, international human-rights groups have waded into this dicey legal territory, condemning the practice of jailing women for disobeying their husbands and families.

At the Kandahar prison, some of the women interviewed recently said they were jailed without a trial. None had a lawyer.

“Hundreds of women and girls are being held in prison across the country, the majority for violating social, behavioural and religious codes,” a 2003 Amnesty International report said. “Like men and children, they are being held for months in prisons across the country before having the legality of their detention determined.”

However, the success of the international human-rights community's efforts has been mixed. In 2002, the federal government released 20 women imprisoned for behavioural crimes, only to see one killed when she returned to her family. Another woman's family rejected her and she had nowhere to go.

In southern Afghanistan, the customs of Pashtunwali, which is the code of conduct practised for centuries by the Pashtun people of southern Afghanistan, take precedence over newly written statutes, according to a report written by the International Legal Foundation, a U.S.-based public defender organization involved in establishing a criminal justice system in Afghanistan.

Under Pashtunwali, married women are the pride, property and responsibility of their husbands. Anyone who provides asylum to a married woman who has fled her household is considered a kidnapper.

It was that Pashtun custom that landed 28-year-old Masomah in the Kandahar jail with Mash Kan, her little daughter.

Masomah, who is originally from Iran, said she gave shelter to a 16-year-old named Safah, who arrived at her Kandahar doorstep, begging. The teenager told her she'd been ordered to leave her household to earn money.

Masomah said she reported the young woman's arrival to police, but it turned out that Safah had fled her husband's family. Police accused Masomah and her husband of harbouring the teenager and also accused Masomah of being a prostitute.

The couple did not have a lawyer and Masomah, who is nine months pregnant, said the judge accepted the allegations in the police report. He sentenced Masomah and her husband to two years in prison. Safah was also given the same sentence and now the two women share a cell along with Mash Kan.

The little girl, who was in her fifth year of primary school at the time of her arrest, is now taking Grade 2 level classes in the prison. A teacher provided by a human-rights group teaches only lower level grades because most of the children are young.

Masomah bears no ill will to Safah, whose arrival at her house unleashed the family's legal nightmare. She believes her family is in prison because they are poor.

“My husband is a taxi driver,” she said. “My family is in Iran. We don't have anyone to support us. We don't have any connections.”

Meanwhile, Shabano is more hopeful that she can get a new hearing before a judge.

In the end, Shabano never married the 50-year-old man. Instead, after her father died, her mother arranged for her to marry a 20-year-old man. This is no love marriage, but in Afghanistan it might be as good as she can get. She plans to stay with him.