Bureau of Corrections planning to educate more prisoners

MANILA, Philippines - The Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) is planning to expand its education system to involve more than 36,000 prisoners all over the country.

BuCor chief Gaudencio Pangilinan said the move is a way to address the country’s problematic reformation system, which he described as “neither focused nor comprehensive.”

Pangilinan said he discovered that “half” of the inmates in the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) in Muntinlupa “did not even finish grade school” when he assumed office in June 2011. NBP houses over 12,000 prisoners.

“And that’s just in NBP alone. Worse, these people, because of their low education attainment, do not bother to complain. They think they do not have the right,” he told The STAR in an earlier interview.

BuCor is an agency under the Department of Justice, which supervises the rehabilitation program for the prisoners detained in the country’s seven penal colonies — the NBP, the Correctional Institute for Women in Mandaluyong, Sablayan Penal and Prison Farm, Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm, Davao Prison and Penal Farm, San Ramon Prison and Penal Farm, and Leyte Regional Prison.

NBP Superintendent Richard Schwarzkopf, in an interview last week, said some of the colonies - although they provide vocational trainings to the prisoners - do not offer formal education system for the inmates.

Of the seven, only NBP has a college education system, which cannot even be availed of by all prisoners. The courses are only offered to medium security inmates, the superintendent said.

To address the problem, Pangilinan said they are thinking of allowing 200 maximum security compound inmates, with ages 25 and below, to take up college course this coming June.

He has also sent the bureau’s chief of education system to visit other colonies, like the one in Leyte, to find schools willing to tie up with BuCor.

“At the minimum, an inmate should finish grade school or high school, depending on the length of time, no matter how old they are,” Pangilinan said.

He said they are also looking for more trainers and teachers to handle the inmates.

“Some (of the colonies may) have the program but we lack the workers, too,” he said.

Last Thursday, 31 of NBP’s prisoner-students graduated from college. This year’s class led by the correction’s football team Puzakals captain Archie Bueno received their diplomas at the University of Perpetual Help in Las Piñas.

Schwarzkopf said that was the first time that the bureau’s director allowed inmates to hold their commencement exercises outside of NBP.

He said this is in line with the bureau’s 10-year road map, which includes a well-crafted reformation program as a way to “help ensure that released inmates are productive, healthy, and are less likely to be in conflict with the law again.”