Philippine prisons in terrible state–US report

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, Manila Times