Philippine prisons in terrible state–US report 
DAN KEENAN and PATSY McGARRY
Mon, Mar 15, 2010
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The conditions of all prisoners whether they have been convicted of a crime or not, are pitiful. Inside the jail, life is unbelievably difficult. |
Criminals, beware. It is not bad enough to be
imprisoned for doing a crime since prisoners also have to endure the
sickening situation of prison and detention centers in the
Philippines, a US report said over the weekend. The US State
Department 2009 Country Report on Human Rights Practices on the
Philippines released Thursday (Friday in Manila) revealed that jails
managed by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP)
operated at an average of 174 percent of designed capacity, while
prison administrators allotted a daily subsistence allowance of P50
per prisoner.
The Bureau of Corrections under the Department of Justice, on the
other hand, administered seven prisons and penal farms for prisoners
sentenced to more than three years in prison.
“The provincial jails and prisons are overcrowded, lacked basic
infrastructure and provided prisoners with an inadequate diet
resulting to lack of potable water, poor sanitation and poor
ventilation,” the report said.
The report identified the slow judicial process and the deficient
parole system as the reasons behind the exacerbated overcrowding,
with at least seven elderly prisoners diagnosed with serious
illnesses dying in prison annually since 2007.
President Gloria Arroyo granted executive clemency to 32 elderly
persons at the end of 2009.
Besides the cramped up prison cells, the report added that prisoners
would also have to deal with widespread corruption among prison
guards and, to some extent, at higher levels of authority within the
prison system.
Worst for women, children
Based on BJMP regulations, male and female inmates are to be held in
separate facilities and, in national prisons, overseen by guards of
the same sex. Anecdotal reports, however, suggested that these
regulations were not uniformly enforced since male guards sometimes
supervised female prisoners directly or indirectly in provincial and
municipal prisons.
Although prison authorities attempted to segregate children or place
them in youth detention centers, children were held in facilities
not fully segregated from adult male inmates in some instances. As
such, girls were sometimes held in the same cells as boys.
Out of 1,011 jails managed by the BJMP and the Philippine National
Police (PNP), only 190 had separate cells for minors, while 334
jails had separate cells for adult females.
“These circumstances continue to cause health problems. Some
prisoners, including women and children, were abused by other
prisoners and prison personnel,” the report added.
While international monitoring groups, such as the International
Committee of the Red Cross, were allowed free access to jails and
prisons, the report disclosed that there is difficulty in accessing
jails or detentions centers where children were held as reported by
a local nongovernment organization.
As part of reform and budget reduction efforts in 2009, the
government consolidated women and minors into fewer jails, including
some that contained separate facilities for those groups.
At the end of 2009, both BJMP and PNP jails held a total 58,786
prisoners. Of this figure, 95 percent of whom were pre-trial
detainees, while the remainder had been convicted of various crimes.
Of the total number of sentenced prisoners and detainees, 5,448 were
adult women, 316 were minor detainees and 13 were convicted minors.
The Bureau of Corrections’ prisons and penal farms, on the other
hand, had 35,934 prisoners in its fold, of whom 1,948 were women.
As this developed, the BJMP released 342 minor inmates usually in
response to a court order following a petition by the public
attorney’s office or the inmate’s private lawyer, or through the
appeals of nongovernment organizations.
Llanesca T. Panti
