By Marichu A. Villanueva
The Philippine Star
A young lawmaker made a very disturbing revelation that he found out from scrutiny of our government’s annual budget they pass upon in Congress every year. In a statement issued yesterday, Aurora Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara discovered the government appears to be spending more on state prisoners than paying for the education of elementary school students.
Angara, son of veteran Senator Edgardo Angara, came up with such observation after doing his own calculations. It appears that we, taxpayers, have been spending P64,000 a year to house, feed and guard just one prisoner per year.
This amount should be of no concern if not compared to the actual budget allocated by the government for education about P8,600 per public elementary student every year. It’s really deplorable, if not an injustice. “That means it’s seven times more expensive to keep a person in jail than to keep a kid in school,” the young Angara rightfully noted.
How did the young Angara come up with these estimates? From official count, Angara got the country’s prison population of 104,710 this year. Of this total, 39,545 are being housed in the seven penitentiaries run by the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor). One of which included the National Bilibid Prisons (NBP) in Muntinlupa City currently under fire for the sneaking in and out of high-profile inmates like ex-Batangas Gov. Antonio Leviste and Rolito Go.
On the other hand, 65,165 of the total number of prisoners are being detained in the 419 jails managed by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP). One of these BJMP-run jails is Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig City where the political warlord clan of former Gov. Andal Ampatuan Sr. are all detained for the infamous Maguindanao massacre.
Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu, who lost his wife and sister in the carnage, denounced jailors of Ampatuan in Camp Bagong Diwa as being lenient to the wealthy and influential Ampatuans. Only recently, another celebrated detainee, road rage killer Jason Ivler, was transferred to Camp Bagong Diwa over alleged VIP treatment he was getting at the Quezon City jail while undergoing trial.
Being an attached agency of the Department of Justice, Secretary Leila De Lima immediately created a fact-finding panel to look into the Leviste caper. The BJMP, on the other hand, is an attached agency under the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG). Secretary Jesse Robredo vowed to look into the complaints of Mangudadatu.
Based on the Congress-approved budget, Angara cited, BuCor has a P1.51 billion allocation for the current year while the BJMP has a P5.15-billion budget. “If you divide the budget of the penal institutions with the total jail population, the expense per prisoner comes to about P63,620 per annum,” Angara explained.
From the report of the BJMP in the official 2010 Philippine Statistical Yearbook, Angara cited, it claimed to have served 58,711 inmates in 2009. But for that year, Angara recalled, the budget that Congress approved for BJMP was based on a jail population of 69,360 based on the BJMP submission. There is obviously a big difference of about 11,000 which Angara branded as “phantom jailbirds.”
If each prisoner has P64,000 allocation in the yearly budget, then some people have been making money out of these “phantom jailbirds.”
Therefore, Angara called for an independent audit and actual head count of prisoners, especially since prison population is not even subject to the Commission on Audit (COA) census. Worse, no such head counts are being done daily as required by prisons’ manual.
This was the startling discovery made during the public hearing that investigated the Leviste caper. Hence, it was no surprise how influential and moneyed inmates like Leviste and Go were able to go in and out of the NBP premises, obviously with ease and connivance with unscrupulous prisons officials.
Doing an ocular inspection of the NBP compound triggered by the Leviste caper, the DOJ fact-finding panel saw for themselves how such “living out” privileges of Leviste and Go have been abused to the hilt. Plus the fact of lack of security provisions to prevent escape of prisoners like close circuit TV cameras in key areas around the more than 500-hectare NBP compound.
When he was the chairman of the Senate justice committee, Sen. Kiko Pangilinan recalled getting a report from the NBP that they averaged 44 cases of escaped convicts. Since we have 52 weeks in a year, the Senator noted, this means almost one escapee a week.
Last week, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) complained that a certain Frank Chua, a Taiwanese national, who is supposed to be serving life imprisonment at the NBP, is no longer there. Chua was caught in 1989 for smuggling into the country more than 80 kilos of shabu.
During his testimony before the DOJ probe panel, BuCor director retired Police General Ernesto Diokno admitted in the serious illegal drug problem right inside the NBP. In fact, Diokno revealed, the illegal drug syndicates are brazenly plying their trade among inmates who are hooked to these narcotic substances apparently smuggled inside their NBP jails. In fact, Diokno said the killing of NBP deputy director for security Rodrigo Mercado, who was gunned down in Laguna last May 6, was a drugs-related crime.
Diokno impressed upon the DOJ probe panel that he was more concerned over this drug problem at the NBP before Leviste pulled his stunt. Diokno stressed he is in charge of policy-making and introduced reforms at the BuCor. But the direct supervision of the day-to-day running of the NBP and the six other penal farms under BuCor, he said, rest with their respective superintendents.
While Diokno may be right on this score, he cannot, however, wash his hands off and turn a blind eye to what’s happening at the NBP where he holds his office.
Leviste’s abuse of his “living out” privilege has brought to fore the systemic bureaucratic disease that threatens the country’s penal system and crushes the ends of justice. And this we cannot allow to happen.
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