EDITORIAL — A warning worth heeding

Speaking before the National Jail Decongestion Summit held here earlier this month, Australian Ambassador to the Philippines Hae Kyong Yu said our congested jails may result in some terrorist inmates influencing and radicalizing other prisoners.

“If we do not get this right, those terrorists who are stuck in jail could potentially come out just as extreme and in fact, in worst case scenarios, even radicalize others,” she said.

We have always been harping on the fact that our congested jails cannot focus on rehabilitating our inmates. And that they have become “schools” where criminals can ironically get better at their craft and even establish links in the criminal underworld. Now it seems we have more to worry about; aside from producing better criminals, our jails may also be churning out terrorists.

Our jail authorities should bear in mind what the ambassador had to say. Australia has a thing or two to teach us about terrorists and dealing with terrorism.

Despite being a developed nation it has actually seen more than its fair share of terrorist attacks since 2014, most notable of which are the December 2014 Sydney hostage crisis, the 2017 Melbourne car attack, the February 2021 arson attacks, and more recently a shooting last week in Queensland.

Her claims are also not baseless, we only need to see what happened in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo to realize that even in the toughest jails people who arrive radicalized leave even more so.

This should give our prison authorities more reason to try to improve our prison system. It’s still a fact that the prisoners inside our jails --especially the richer and more powerful ones-- are more in control of what goes on than the authorities themselves.

This development becomes more relevant in light of the recent terror attack in the Mindanao State University where four people were killed and more than 40 others hurt after an explosive went off the middle of a Mass being celebrated at a gym.

We cannot afford to let our jails become places where the doctrine of terrorism is spread.