State of our jails

The detention of three senators charged with plunder in connection to the P10 billion pork barrel scam is an opportunity to turn our eyes to the abysmal state of the nation’s correctional facilities and do something about it.

We bristle at the gall of Senators Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. and Jose “Jinggoy” Estrada to whine about the presence of cockroaches and rodents in their rooms and to ask for amenities normally offered to guests in a hotel.

We use “rooms” since their spacious quarters can hardly be called “cells” in contrast to the stockades where suspected criminals are thrown in, although a court of law has yet to pronounce them, senators included, guilty as charged.

That is extraordinary unfairness, called out last week when the solons’ fellow detainees complained about extended visiting hours and the soirees held in the center for Revilla and Estrada.

Those accused who hold high stations in life must not be accorded special treatment. The government has to show that crookedness does not pay.

The lawyers of the accused senators—including Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile who is under hospital arrest—insist that their clients have a right to humane treatment bordering on deference to royalty.

Well then, every other accused or imprisoned Juan de la Cruz and Maria Clara from Batanes to Jolo deserves an upgrade of treatment.

Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV is right. Fairness entails more than just the curtailing of privileges of the indicted mighty. It also demands that we shun subhuman handling of the accused and the convicted lowly.

So far, senators Revilla, Estrada and Enrile have had it easy. If they go the way of ex-convict and Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada, their trial and imprisonment will lead to nothing but a furlough in which someone like Enrile will be in just the perfect position to write another memoir.

Multitudes of Filipinos behind bars are not as lucky, stuck as our culture is in the mentality that in jail, the wicked should rot, never mind the Christian precept that counts compassion for the imprisoned as a corporal act of mercy.

At a recent United Nations conference, the country acknowledged that its jails are afflicted with congestion, bureaucratic mismanagement, lack of information technology systems and expertise, and inadequately trained officials and staff.

That means extreme overcrowding, dirty water, dingy toilets, substandard meals, gang wars, favoritism among guards and administrators for at least 100,000 inmates under the Bureau of Jail and Management Penology, according to People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance, a nongovernment organization.

In jails in the National Capital Region, inmates have to take turns sleeping on the floor.
Senators Revilla, Estrada and Enrile have nothing to cry about.

The state’s jailers, meanwhile, need to improve supervision of the vast majority of inmates.
Our own Constitution condemns degrading punishment, inadequate facilities and subhuman conditions for prisoners.

The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that, “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners, the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.”