Raymund Narag spent nearly seven years in Metro Manila’s notorious Quezon City jail for a crime he did not commit. Three years after he was released from his living hell, he published a book about his experience called “Freedom and Death: Inside the Jail.” Published in 2005, it paints a harrowing picture of a prison system more in tune with the 19th century than the modern age.
Narag lays out in graphic detail the subhuman existence inmates are forced to endure: the stench, the overcrowding, the toilets that run like rivers through the cells, disease and death. Built in the 1950s, Quezon City jail was only supposed to house 236 inmates. Today, it is home to more than 3,000 — packed in so tight that many inmates sleep standing up. It is a scene repeated around the country in a prison system grossly undermanned, poorly funded and neglected by the country’s economic planners.
According to Chief Superintendent Antonio Cruz, head of the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology and the largest cog in a fragmented penal service, the system is near to breaking point. “Overcrowding is our most pressing problem,” he said. Cruz’s bureau, which is an arm of the Interior Department, runs 1,100 prisons with a total cell area of just over 56,000 square metres and a population, at the end of 2006, of more than 60,000 inmates; most are awaiting trial while a small percentage are serving sentences for minor crimes like theft, and illegal drug use. Another 200 prisons are run by the police forces of smaller provincial towns, as Cruz’s bureau, with just 7,000 personnel, cannot cope. Ideally, he said, the system needs another 35,000 guards and support staff. About 17,000 other inmates convicted of more serious crimes like murder, kidnapping and drug dealing are housed in slightly better facilities at the National Penitentiary compound in southern Manila.
200 IN A CELL FOR 20
The UN Standard of the Minimum Treatment of Prisoners, to which the Philippine government is a signatory, gives clear guidelines on how prisoners should be treated, including bedding and food, and states: “It is not desirable to have two prisoners in a cell or room.” In the Quezon City jail, a 30-square-metre cell, with a holding capacity for 20, houses 180 to 200 inmates. Nearly a thousand death row inmates contributed to the overcrowding at the maximum security section of the National Penitentiary after Congress abolished the death penalty last year.
“Conditions are a bit better here,” says inmate Rodolfo Fernandez. “Back at the provincial jail, there would be 100 of us in a cell built for 40. Even the spaces beneath the beds were occupied.” (Fernandez was jailed for life, while seeking work abroad, for swindling neighbors of their life savings.) Still, of the 185 inmates at his new quarters, only 80 have beds while 105 use their own mats to sleep on the floor. Policing packed jails with a handful of men is “very difficult,” Cruz said. The rotting jail facilities themselves “become a rich source for improvising deadly weapons” such as rusted iron bars.
The US State Department, in a human rights report on the Philippines two years ago, said the country’s prison conditions were “rudimentary and sometimes harsh,” were “overcrowded, lacked basic infrastructure, and provided prisoners with an inadequate diet.” It said the “slow judicial process exacerbated the problem of overcrowding. Some inmates took turns sleeping, and others slept on their feet.” The study also cited “widespread corruption” among guards as well as “reports that guards abused prisoners,” including women who were “particularly vulnerable to sexual and physical assault by police and prison guards.”
60% ARE DRUG OFFENDERS
Cruz admits congestion exposes inmates to “diseases, contamination,” and warns the problem will probably get worse before it gets better. But he denies prisoners are physically or sexually abused. He estimates the prison population will rise by about 13 percent a year over the next eight years mainly due to case overload within the undermanned judicial system, as well as higher bail bonds imposed on drug offenders who make up 60 percent of the national prison population.
Manila-based business consultant Peter Wallace said recently there are about a million cases pending for 1,470 judges across the country because a third of the country’s courts are without a judge. “For a salary of 20,000 pesos (about 409 dollars), there’s little question as to why that’s so,” he said. Less than one percent of the national budget goes to the judiciary.
With an annual budget of just 2.8 billion pesos (57 million dollars), “we don’t have enough financial support to construct new jails,” Cruz said. “Realistically,” he added, “under these conditions, rehabilitation — the fundamental objective of the penal system — just does not take place. You just go back and forth in the system, committing the same offense. In the Manila city jail, for example, if we release 100 prisoners today, there will be another 300 (offenses) committed,” he said.
