Who cares for the innocent?

Gregorio Miguel Pallugna

ONE of the basic tenets of our Constitution is the presumption of innocence of an accused person. This is why, while a person is detained during trial for a non-bailable offense, he is never considered a criminal until he is finally convicted.

Here in Cagayan de Oro, detainees whose cases are ongoing are kept at the Lumbia City Jail, and once convicted they are transferred to the Davao Penal Colony to serve their sentence. The purpose of putting them in jail pending trial is to ensure that they do not evade the sentence which may later be imposed on them, if they are convicted. It is not intended to punish them because, again, they are presumed to be innocent.

Unfortunately for those innocent persons who are falsely or mistakenly charged in Court, the state of our jails are so terrible that this temporary detention can be one of the most difficult penalties one can get.

Our Constitution also provides that inhumane, cruel and degrading punishment is prohibited. The problem is that imprisonment in the Philippines is probably one of the most inhuman treatment anyone can ever get. And the worst thing about it is that nobody seems to care.

No matter how hard our friends at the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) work to improve the state of our jails, it is simply impossible to make it bearable when you make 4,000 persons fit inside a facility intended for a maximum of 1,000 detainees.

For those who have not seen what’s happening inside our jails, you are very lucky to be saved from the agony. For one, prisoners have to take turns sleeping because if they all lie down at the same time they will not fit even on the floors. Some have to stand up while others sleep, and take note that these are the people sleeping on the floors because the very few wooden beds are all occupied already. They have no mattresses so they sleep on the cold, concrete floor.

Let’s not even talk about the bathrooms. To say that it is inhumane, cruel and degrading is definitely an understatement. Let me emphasize again that we are talking about persons who have not been convicted yet and are actually considered innocent under our laws. Later on, many of these prisoners will be acquitted but the punishment shall have already been suffered.

As if the misery was not enough, trials for criminal cases take years! Add to that the flood of drugs cases that came with the government’s campaign against illegal drugs and the length of time one spends in jail pending trial increases exponentially.

The Supreme Court attempted to make a solution by implementing the Rule on Continuous Trial of Criminal Cases, which threatens judges with administrative charges if they fail to finish drug cases within sixty days and other criminal cases within 180 days. Unfortunately, this proved to be a pretend solution because it simply is humanly impossible for the courts to schedule cases on a week to week basis when they are handling up to 900 cases at once. Even the best of judges could not possibly follow a rule that fails to consider that judges are human beings and that there are only 24 hours each day.

With this solution not working, it falls upon Congress to do something by increasing the number of our courts, judges and court personnel and increasing the capacity of our jails. Of course, we cannot expect them to do that because they never experience the plight of ordinary detainees. After all, when the likes of de Lima, Estrada, Arroyo, Revilla and Enrile are imprisoned, they get their own private air-conditioned rooms. If Congress refuses to do something to improve the state of our jails, the government should just stop the practice of giving them special treatment and place them in the same jails where ordinary Filipinos are detained. That should motivate them to secure that our jails are at least bearable.

While the Commission on Human Rights is correct to make sure that drug operations are conducted with due regard for human rights, and should file appropriate cases when there is proof that these rights are violated by our law enforcers, the CHR should prove its genuine concern for human beings by insisting that our prisoners are given the most basic right to bearable and humane treatment in our jails.

Why hasn’t Chito Gascon been ranting about this problem about our jails? Why isn’t anybody talking about it in media? Should we all wait until it is us who are put in such a horrifying experience? Because frankly, I would rather be shot dead in a fabricated police operation than to be put in jail for a false charge and suffer indignity and squalor for 10 years during trial and appeal only later on to be acquitted. That, to me, would be the most inhumane, cruel and degrading punishment one could ever get. Sometimes we pause and wonder, does anybody genuinely care for the innocent?