CoA: 341 out of 488 Philippine jails ‘congested’
The Commission on Audit said that more than half of jail facilities in the country are overcrowded, based on its annual audit conducted last 2025.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BJMP
The Commission on Audit (CoA) reported that more than half of jail facilities in the Philippines were operating beyond their intended design capacities, leaving detainees exposed to substandard living environments, and health and biosecurity risks.
State auditors said that there were a total of 341 facilities which exhibited “critical congestion rates” in 2025, violating the prescribed 4.7 square meter per inmate in the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology’s (BJMP) policies.
Based on its annual audit, CoA stated that the BJMP was catering to a total of 113,937 persons deprived of liberty (PDLs) across its 488 jail facilities which cover a total of 240,307 square meters of land.
The agency said that overcrowding indicated the need to construct an additional 295,197 square meters of jail infrastructure to address the issue.
Facilities in Regions III, IV-A, V, VII, the Negros Island Region, and the National Capital Region exhibited the highest congestion rates in the country.
In Region VII, in particular, the ideal capacity of PDLs based on the jail facilities it had was only 4,578, however, it was found that there were 15,717 detainees in the area.
The NCR and Region IV-A, meanwhile, had similarly high variance when it came to their jail populations and ideal capacities at 13,901 and 13,741, respectively.
It was further disclosed that the most congested facility in the country was Consolacion Municipal Jail in Cebu, which had a congestion rate of 2,000 percent.
State auditors would point out that the average congestion rate had dropped in recent years, going from 367 percent in 2022 down to 279 percent in 2025.
Even with the findings, CoA said that the percentages still far exceeded what was prescribed in both local and international laws.
“While this positive trend indicates progress in institutional decongestion strategies, the current baseline remains significantly elevated above prescribed humanitarian thresholds,” the report indicated.
The agency said that the overcrowding in jail facilities serves as a “critical bottleneck” in the ability of the BJMP to afford PDLs with essential needs such as food, medical care, and rehabilitation supplies.
CoA explained that the bureau was hindered in performing its dual statutory mandate of humane safekeeping and comprehensive inmate development due to the discovered structural limitations.
It is worth noting that state auditors stated that the BJMP had already undertaken initiatives in an attempt to address the severe congestion rates in their facilities, with the initiation of 43 construction projects intended to provide spatial relief for areas with the most overcrowding.
With the projects still subject to implementation, however, CoA vowed to continue monitoring the completion of the infrastructure projects as well as the continuity of other paralegal programs for the release of PDLs.