Porous jails

The public is frustrated with the criminal justice system, and among the
reasons is the porousness of the nations detention facilities. This became
evident again last Sunday, when 13 inmates facing drug charges escaped
before dawn from the detention facility of the Philippine Drug Enforcement
Agency at Camp Olivas in Pampanga, home of the Philippine National Police
regional office in Central Luzon.

As of late yesterday afternoon, six of the escapees had returned to the

detention facility, with the rest likely to turn themselves in as well. This was
after the PNP and PDEA reportedly issued a shoot-to-kill order for the
escapees, most of whom are from Pampanga and Tarlac.

Initial investigation showed that the inmates sawed off the grills of their cell
and escaped through a private subdivision at the back of the police camp.
How do inmates get hold of a saw? Such mysteries are not unusual in the
nations detention facilities. High-value terrorists, kidnappers and drug
traffickers have waltzed out of supposedly maximum security detention even
at the PNP headquarters at Camp Crame.

When inmates arent sawing off jail grills, their cohorts are springing them from
detention. Communist rebels, Islamic separatists, the Abu Sayyaf, the
Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and, more recently, the Islamic State-
inspired Maute group have raided government detention facilities and sprung
their cohorts. Last month, about a hundred gunmen said to be linked to the
Moro Islamic Liberation Front swooped down on the North Cotabato District
Jail in Kidapawan, killed a guard and freed over 150 inmates in what has been
described as the countrys biggest jailbreak.

Authorities have cited overcrowded jails as well as the insufficiency of

custodial personnel and security equipment for the vulnerability of detention
facilities to raids and escapes. Corruption is also a serious problem in jails and
national prisons.

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Shame campaign
This has been tried before, and discarded. Alfredo Lim, dubbed the Dirty
Harry of the Philippines, spray-painted the houses of drug suspects in Manila
in a shame campaign that was declared unconstitutional in 2000 by the Court
of Appeals.

Spray-painting homes is better than executing drug suspects, but that doesnt
make such a campaign compliant with the Constitution. This time, with the
bloody campaign against illegal drugs slowed down by abuses committed by
the police unit principally tasked to wage the war, the administration is
considering its version of the shame campaign: posting stickers on houses
that are deemed drug-free.

Interior Secretary Mike Sueno, proponent of the scheme, described it as a

nonviolent and encouraging tack against illegal drugs. It undoubtedly is less
violent than Oplan Tokhang. But the scheme has a glaring flaw: it identifies
homes without the stickers as drug-affected. As in the spray-painting
campaign, the sticker approach stigmatizes everyone in the household
including children. In this administration, it also raises the danger of a deadly
raid on homes without stickers, either by anti-narcotics agents or vigilantes.

In considering the proposal, the administration should go back to the ruling of

the appellate court on Lims spray-painting shame campaign, which was
authorized through a city ordinance when he was mayor of Manila. The
purpose and intention of the ordinance is highly commendable, the court
ruled. But good intentions are not enough. The end does not justify the
means. We still have to adhere to the rule of law always, the rule of law.

Such a campaign, the ruling declared, violates constitutional guarantees on

the presumption of innocence and the right to due process, which are enjoyed
by all drug suspects. As in Tokhang, the houses that were spray-painted
belonged mainly to the poor. And as Tokhang has shown, such campaigns are
prone to abuse by those tasked to implement it.

Drug addiction is a family tragedy that is merely aggravated by a shame

campaign. There are other ways of fighting the drug menace, focusing on the
manufacturers and major distributors of prohibited drugs as well as their
coddlers in the police and civilian government.
From http://m.philstar.com/opinion/show/ad113926f2bad4d510d9dc4b4725720d?
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