“The system is beset by problems, based on the incidences of jailbreaks alone.

I guess it was a good thing that opposition Sen. Leila de Lima was detained – not for her, obviously, but perhaps for the country’s jail systems.

On Nelson Mandela Day last 18 July, she released a statement on a bill she filed “to help reform the corrections and jail management system in the Philippines,” she said. Mandela, of course, was the influential leader known for Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and the first President of a free South Africa.

De Lima cited both the 1987 Constitution and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the “Nelson Mandela Rules” as inspirations for the bill, which basically suggests that the system be integrated under one agency.

At present, the prisons and penal farms are under the Bureau of Corrections-Department of Justice . Provincial jails are under the provincial governments while the district, city and municipal jails are under the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (BJMP-DILG).

The system is beset by problems, based on the incidences of jailbreaks alone. Jailbreaks have become disturbingly common fodder for the news.

There was the Bacoor jailbreak recently where 22 prisoners were able to escape by overpowering a jail guard. In January, 158 prisoners were freed when suspected Muslim guerrillas stormed a jail in Kidapawan. In February 2018, 29 inmates escaped from inside a police station in Jolo because the jailguard was reportedly not around. In May this year, six inmates bolted their cells in a 70-year-old detention facility in Cotabato City, Maguindanao.

Local governments must think seriously about upgrading, if not building new detention centers in their towns – unless they can assure the public that no more criminals will have to be caught and brought to justice ever again!

That, of course, is fiction, in a country where the police-to-population ratio has yet to reach “secure” levels.

A report in July this year also revealed that our jails “have hit a 612 percent congestion rate,” according to the Commission on Audit (CoA) in its 2017 audit report on the BJMP.

According to CoA, as quoted in a news report, “jails originally meant to contain only 20,653 are now bursting with 146,302 inmates.” The same report added that there were “257,587 cases of ailments in 2017, a 34.47 percent increase from the 191,550 ailments recorded in 2016.”

It is no secret that Philippine jails are jammed beyond capacity. Prisoners are packed like sardines, hardly able to sleep in a supine position. Sickness is common and let us not even talk about the possible psychological rehabilitation of convicts.

These correctional facilities are ill-maintained and unhygienic where inmates face the daily challenge of heat, hunger, boredom and threats of violence while the lucky few with cash to spare can enjoy private quarters and luxuries.

This has been changed, they say, after the raids on the National Bilibid yielded a world that would have made Brillante Mendoza salivate for independent cinema plots. That, however, is another story.

More, more facilities are needed to house the number of prisoners caught for assorted crimes, from petty to maximum security, especially now that the police are working double-time to catch drug perpetrators.

The problem is overwhelming, not just literally. Just imagine: one jail guard per 60 inmates was the ratio of custodial personnel to inmate, according to a broadsheet report in April 2017, while the police-to-population ratio is 1:572.

The problem is much bigger than we think: a gaping lack of personnel willing to risk their lives to serve and protect.

It may be a problem that applies not only to police, for all we know.