An 8-year-old boy was found locked in a shipping container over the weekend when police in New South Wales, Australia raided an illegal marijuana farm.

According to The Daily Telegraph, cops found the boy completely by accident as they were scouring the plantation.

“The boy was being held in an above ground shipping container, which had been converted to feature walls inside,” the article said.

“The container could only be opened from the outside and inside had a ‘firebox’ for the boy to keep himself warm and a mattress.”

The boy told authorities that he’d been locked in the container for two to three weeks and that he’d survived entirely on chips and a box of granola bars.

After finding the boy and hearing his story, the cops arrested his 26-year-old mother and her 28-year-old fiance.

“The mother and her fiancee are charged with detaining a person with intent and failing to provide the necessities of life,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

“Her fiance is also charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm.”

The mother and fiance claim that the boy is exaggerating what happened. They maintain that they’d only locked the boy into the container for a short time because he’d been behaving badly.

Either way, locking a kid into a container as punishment seems pretty messed up.

And parenting isn’t the only thing these two were guilty of: sources report that their entire grow operation was a bust.

“They are also charged with cultivating a large commercial quantity of a prohibited plant in relation to the marijuana, which is understood to be a botched crop that contained all leaves and no seeds.”

These are the types of characters that too often give the cannabis community a bad name. Many pro-pot activists hope that marijuana legalization will help get rid of people like this, effectively moving them and their product out of the weed market.