Behind bars

Yesterday was Prison Awareness Sunday capping the Prison Awareness Week. The day and the week has come and gone yet very few really gave the occasion and its supposed "causes celebres" the kind of attention they deserve at least once a year. Apathy and even hatred oftentimes prevail in our dealings with those behind bars maybe because of the notion that they justly deserve to be deprived of their freedom and to be taken away from the mainstream of society for the harm they have inflicted on it. This is however a wrong and misplaced impression.

Not every person in jail deserves to be there. Prisoners are of two kinds: the convicts and the accused. Under our Revised Penal Code only convicts are imprisoned as punishment for being found guilty of committing crimes beyond reasonable doubt. The accused are detained after their arrests only because they cannot post the required bail for their release, or the crimes they are suspected of committing are non-bailable. Accused persons are still presumed innocent because they have not yet been tried and duly convicted. Hence their imprisonment is not a form of punishment but an assurance that they will be around for trial and possible sentencing if found guilty. Generally they deserve to be released if their presence at the trial can be guaranteed usually by a bail or cash bond. But when they are accused of capital crimes and evidence of guilt is strong, they have to be detained until final disposition of their case.

The most famous example of the exception is a deposed President accused of plunder punishable by death who is now detained in a rest house with all the luxurious amenities which persons without any charges at all do not, or cannot even enjoy. Concededly since the main object of detaining an accused is to eliminate the risk of flight, being detained Erap style is not really illegal especially considering his stature and the presumption of his innocence. The anomaly is in the scandalous disparity of treatment between him and other detainees charged with lesser offenses and with weaker evidences of guilt. If he could be allowed to stay in a palatial rest house with several bedrooms and T & B’s, well stocked with sumptuous food and drinks, the Government should at least provide the other detained lesser mortals with sleeping spaces where they could lay their heads each night, with more sanitary toilets and baths than the existing one for every 250 inmates at a given time, and with decent meals fit for human consumption. The unfairness of it all is highlighted by the fact that, with lavish accommodations enabling him to have the luxury of time, our famous detainee obviously wants and gets to delay and prolong his case; whereas other detainees, particularly the innocent ones languishing in jails with unbearable and inhuman conditions, obviously yearn but are denied a speedy disposition of their cases. These disparities caused by faulty administration of justice and inadequate jail management are the stuffs that render the situation highly anomalous. The detainees who have less in life have lesser in law while those who have more in life have more in law. In the end, innocent detainees may even suffer the inhuman conditions of our jails longer than the sentence for the crimes they are charged while others who appear guiltier may not suffer such kind of punishment at all.

Even convicts serving their sentences in jails are also entitled to humane treatment. To be sure, some of them enjoy special accommodations in the penitentiary but the greater number is not as fortunate. With the passage of the 1987 Constitution suspending the imposition of death penalty except on heinous crimes, there is a clear shift in the theory of punishment from retributive justice – where criminals are punished in retribution for his offense and as an example and warning to others – to reformative and preventive justice which views crime as a social phenomenon and attaches much importance to the criminal and the actor as "only a sick man who needs not to be punished but cured". Indeed recent statistics gathered by Catanduanes Representative Joseph Santiago indicate that death penalty has failed to discourage violent sexual assaults on women and other reprehensible crimes. Figures of the PNP shows that 1,548 rape cases were reported for the last six months compared to 1,459 last year. The report says that the death penalty has merely pushed rapists to try to cover up their crime by killing their hapless victims who are usually the only witness.

So even as the Prison Awareness Week has come and gone, Government should still look into and study how to alleviate the inhuman conditions inside the jails and get rid of the unequal treatment of detainees, as well as to enact legislations that would make the punishments for crimes more humane.

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