Except for a few exceptions, one doesn’t expect Metro Cebu jails or any jail in the world to be anything but dismal.
Jails aren’t built to provide free board and lodging for first-time offenders or hardened criminals.
They are built to keep people who are accused of committing crime away from the population, from causing harm to society while their court trials are ongoing.
In the United States and other First World countries, detention centers are more spacious and modern.
The Philippines doesn’t have that luxury.
Jails here are hell holes of concrete and sweat.
State penitentiaries have sub-cultures of inmates where only the very rich or very powerful, who get convicted, can request better quarters or build those quarters themselves either out of their own pockets or through ill-gotten wealth.
A distinction has to be made clear.
Detention inmates are not the dregs of society.
They are not “convicts” until their trial is concluded and the judge pronounces them guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
That’s why many jails go by the long title “detention and rehabilitation center”. The occupants, even those who have returned for the nth time, enjoy the presumption of innocence in the eyes of the law, even if the average citizen stereotypes anyone who’s did time in jail, as a crook.
For this reason, there is more than justified concern – other than humanitarian reasons –– to pay attention to how society attends to conditions of those in jail.
They hold individuals who have not been pronounced absolutely guilty, and a good number who have overstayed their punishment.
As recounted in Cebu Daily News’s series on life in congested jails in “Journey Behind Bars” that began last Monday, inmates in the Mandaue City Jail have it the worst.
Overcrowding is an understatement in a facility that confines grown men in cubicles that hold tenfold their capacity.
Most inmates aren’t holding up well. There’s the heat, loss of privacy, foul odor, lack of sanitation, the spread of disease and and the pervasive presence of all sorts of diseases that may kill them long after the courts had resolved their appeals for release.
There are inmates who are either wrongly accused jail, or those whose sentence had long been served but they remain in detention because of inadequate legal assistance.
Jails aren’t supposed to be vacation spots where people move about freely.
But neither are they supposed to be dead ends.