Pubdate: Mon, 25 Apr 2005
Source: Philippine Star (Philippines)
Copyright: PhilSTAR Daily Inc. 2005
Contact:  http://www.philstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/622
Author: Jarius Bondoc
Cited: Philippines Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)

JAILING 3 INMATES PER SQUARE-METER

The country's securest jail literally was caught off guard.

A handful of guards were on their 16th hour of straight duty at dawn of 
Mar. 14 at the Metro Manila District Jail inside Taguig police Camp R. 
Papa. Hungry and tired, some of them were napping on desks, others showering.

Most were dutifully at their posts although equally groggy and terribly 
undermanned. The shift that was supposed to take over the night before had 
not shown up. It was a perfect scenario for a jailbreak for 15 inmates, 
members all of the Abu Sayyaf and adept at battle planning.

Two "trustees", inmates assigned housekeeping chores, were serving 
breakfast as usual.

One was boiling noodle soup just outside the first gate to the kidnapping 
indictees' high-security dorm. The other had unlocked the inner gate to 
hand out bowls.

Five escapees overpowered them in a flash. Others quickly filed out, 
freeing more confederates with stolen keys. Armed with four handguns, 
grenades and daggers that visitors had managed to sneak in weeks before, 
they attacked and killed three sleepy guards, and padlocked another inside 
the bathroom.

They ran into and shot a fifth guard as they were exiting the building.

Fortunately the shots alerted sentries on elevated outposts outside, and 
they forced the escapees back in with a volley of rifle fire. But the 
latter, by then numbering more than 30, took dozens of fellow-detainees 
hostage at the second-floor cells and ordered all the remaining guards out 
but leave their guns behind, or else face a massacre.

After a 27-hour impasse, police assaulted the building with teargas and 
rifles, killing 22 inmates and losing one comrade.

That was how the interior office reconstructed events to find out last week 
where the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) had gone wrong. 
Foremost in the list of lapses was entrusting keys to "trustees". It is 
barred by the BJMP manual of procedures, but happened just the same due to 
manpower shortage.

That the detainees had guns - smuggled piece-by-piece buried in cooked-rice 
pots, according to a confessed escapee - also pointed to lax checks on 
visitors.

Some say it also magnifies the BJMP's lack of modern detection gadgets.

And that the guards temptingly carried holstered handguns inside the jail 
corridors and were easily overpowered smacked of indiscipline and ill training.

All this boils down, however, to an acute scarcity of funds for jail 
maintenance - a malady that afflicts all the country's detention facilities.

The Taguig jailbreak could well have occurred - with similar grim outcomes 
- - in any of the BJMP's hundreds of district, city and town jails. 
(Provincial jails are under the capitols' supervision; cells for convicts, 
the Bureau of Prisons and Corrections.) All the jails are undermanned. BJMP 
has barely 5,000 personnel - including those on administrative duties - 
handling roughly 60,000 inmates nationwide. The ideal guard-to-inmate ratio 
is 1:7, but in RP it's 1:14. BJMP needs to double its strength, but the 
government has no money for it. In some rural jails, the ratio is 1:60; 
urban jails can be worse at 1:120. At the Taguig jail, a 105-man staff 
works long shifts handling 1,420 inmates.

To meet the right ratio, it must have 600 men. Only half of BJMP guards 
have guns.

Detainees have to be brought to courts for trials.

The ideal inmate-to-escort ratio is 1:1 + 1, that is, 11 escorts for 10 
inmates, or 21 escorts for 20 inmates, and so on. On a given day, however, 
there's only one escort for every 20 inmates in transit.

No wonder, Sen. Ralph Recto counts one escape every three days. 
Undermanned, under-equipped, under-trained, that's the plight of jail 
guards. And it's only half the story.

Detainees are presumed innocent until proven otherwise, and so placed under 
the interior office's BJMP, not the justice department's prisons.

But the budget lack punishes them well before conviction. Most jails are 
congested five times over. There are not enough bunks for detainees.

With only one bed for every 20 of them, most have to sleep on the cold 
cement floor, often in turns.

The UN Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners requires a space of 
three square-meters per inmate.

In RP, the usual is three inmates per square-meter. BJMP has no provisions 
for clothing, beddings and toiletries. There is only one toilet bowl per 
100 inmates.

BJMP's food budget per detainee is a dismal P11.70 per meal, or P35 per 
day. The allocation for medicine is P56 per inmate per year. Yet the inmate 
population has been growing at least 12 percent per year, largely from the 
passage of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, which made 
selling any small or big amount of drugs a no-bail offense.

The minimum bail for the lighter charge of drug possession under it is 
P200,000, hardly affordable for the addict in the slums.

The reenactment of the 2002 national budget in 2003-2004 placed 14,000 new 
detainees outside the food and medicine payroll.

Thus, sickness spread, and 172 jail deaths were listed last year alone.

At the Quezon City jail, where 3,200 detainees are packed into a space for 
only 600, there were five deaths per month.

It would have been worse had city hall not donated funds to feed the 
inmates and expand the facilities from the old 400-capacity.

The average jail stay of inmates in bailable cases is one year; for no-bail 
offenses, three-and-a-half years.

Yet, only one out of five eventually is judged guilty as charged.

The rest are either found innocent, or turn out to have stayed in jail for 
the same length of time they would have served in prison had they been 
convicted.

So much for the presumption of innocence.
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