Useless prison revamp
If anything should be revamped in the prison system, it should be the way the system treats prisoners, which is almost inhuman, as prisoners are all expected to suffer in crowded cells, stinking bathrooms and virtually being fed with canine food.
Instead of having a rehabilitative penal system, what this country insists on is to even have a stricter punitive penal system, which is, in all probability, the reason prisoners who have the means to get themselves better prison lodgings and better food, get for themselves these “perks” and the reason too that corruption becomes even more intense.
Our jails are overcrowded, and yet there has been no move on the part of government, the executive and the legislative departments, along with the judiciary, past and present, to improve living conditions in jails, whether in Bilibid or in city jails, or provincial jails, for that matter.
What is wrong with giving convicts, and especially detainees in city jails, house arrests with electronic monitoring bracelets, for authorities to check on their whereabouts? Such a system would certainly help decongest jails.
What is so wrong with judges suspending a prison sentence of a convicted felon, if the crime is not murder or rape or some other heinous crime, as long as the convicted felon is a first time offender?
That convicted felon can certainly be made to do some community service as his penalty instead of a jail term.
It is being done in other democratic countries and there is no reason for the same system to be applied in this country.
The truth is, with detainees and convicts living in a hell hole and being housed in cells with murderers and rapists, these convicts and detainees can hardly be expected to be rehabilitated. Instead, they become hardened criminals, which will spawn more hardened criminals because the current system actually breeds such hardened criminals.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) is said to be recommending a “total overhaul” of the penal system, following the controversy over the special privileges enjoyed by former Batangas Gov. Antonio Leviste and other VIP inmates of the New Bilibid Prison (NBP).
“We will recommend a total overhaul of the system in the NBP, the replacement of the guards and even the officers. We are discussing the possibility of having some members of the Philippine Army guard the NBP in the meantime,” the current Officer-in-Charge and head of the DoJ panel investigating Leviste’s unauthorized furlough was quoted as saying.
“There will be replacements or reassignments. We will include among our recommendations the retraining and reorientation among prison personnel. We will inculcate professionalism in the ranks,” he stressed.
But what is meant by a total overhaul is to bring the Army in, for added security. But this is not the function or duty of the Army. There is also that recommendation of a top to bottom reshuffle and the claimed strengthening of the security measures in the national penitentiary and inculcate professionalism.
But does the DoJ really believe that such changes will stop the so-called VIP prisoners from seeking better living prison conditions, or even stop the corruption within the penal system?
The Army can be made to look the other way, as the Bureau of Corrections officers and staff have been doing — until something like the Leviste caper happens, and then, after a time, everything goes back to “normal” in prison life.
There will be, for starters, a “stricter” way of dealing with VIP prisoners. But for how long? Until after the media lose interest in the issue.
But it will crop up again, when the media spot yet another VIP prisoner out of jail as the media in general, embrace the punitive penal system, and appear to believe that prisoners should be made to suffer and rot in overcrowded jails, innocent or guilty. Instead of rehabilitating them, and treat them humanely, they prefer to live like pigs, as to them, that is the penalty for the crime committed.
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