One overarching argument that justifies the release of inmates in prisons is the problem of congestion in the Philippine corrections system. In 2019 alone, 215,000 were jailed, which translates into an incarceration rate of 200 per 100,000 population. Earlier that year, we ranked 6th highest prison population out of 21 Asian countries — what with 933 prisons running, all in all.
Another plausible argument is defended by the notion that inmates are not supposed to be in prison in the first place. But how awkward could that sound when everyone imagines how bad a day it is to be in a "huge warehouse" called New Bilibid Prison?
This isn't America but Filipino prison mentality embraced the cruel notion of "an eye for an eye" which betrays any sense of humanity in the way we run our prisons, if in a larger sense the whole justice system. But so far as America is concerned, "warehousing humans" descended from their racist love for slavery which is certainly alien to Filipinos. This explains films depicting prisoners treated as "slaves of the state" to do hard labor.
Whatever reasons surround release — expiration of sentence, grant of parole or pardon, executive clemency, reprieve, commutation of sentence — serving time in prison should not have happened were it not for inherent imperfections in the very pillars of the criminal justice system. Decriminalization of crimes and diversion programs were two approaches to decongesting prisons, but it is of uncertain validity if they ever gained traction.
It's quite an altruism that "not all behind bars are guilty nor all outside not so". Tales have it that some were just framed by the police; policemen who planted evidence; who subjected them to third-degree; and employed any other dirty trick in the playbook. Are the police there "to protect and to serve" knowing their involvement in every profitable crime imaginable?
Nothing about prisons reads into public policy because no one is concerned about the kind of life an inmate experiences behind those bars, and other inmates whose stories richly inform prison studies. Have inmates ceased to be part of society the moment they are locked in these "warehouses" that hardly befit humans?
Sadly, politicians themselves subscribe to retributive justice than a humanitarian philosophy even invoking that "punishment for violation of laws is constitutionally-enshrined and legally enforced." No wonder then that they craft laws with strong and heavy punitive content.
With the good Justice Secretary's resolve to release more prisoners than build more prisons that some fools advocate, it's best instead to revisit the "big tent" of the criminal justice system in its five pillars — law enforcement, prosecution, courts, corrections, and community — each a problem by itself.
Our prison system miserably failed in three substantial standards, viz: spatial density (square meter per person); social density (number of persons in one space); and privacy (time individuals can spend on their own). Imagine a cell with just one comfort room; imagine further, 80 persons inhabit one cell; still, imagine two persons in every bed in a row of three-deckers.
For an avid disciple of Plato, there is ground to argue, thus — "the idea of depriving people of their liberty as a punishment for criminal deeds rests on the arguably bizarre, metaphysical notion that one can make the punishment fit the crime by calibrating its severity in the metric of time: say 5 years for a rape, 30 years for a murder — but why not longer or shorter for each?"
The Philippine prison landscape leaves much to be desired. As of November 2021, the New Bilibid Prison housed 28,545 inmates, exceeding the ideal capacity of 6,435. Even if the government will release 400 inmates each year for six years, that would have reduced only 8 percent of the total number and far at sea to reach zero population. It takes 71 years or the year 2093 for that hell to be empty.
