Escape strategies

To any Filipino accustomed to disappointment with the workings of our criminal justice system, last week’s news about Imelda Marcos’ graft conviction must have been an unexpected and happy development. It’s not the first time that she has faced charges, since she was convicted on two corruption charges in 1993 and was eventually acquitted, but the recent news comes in a climate where the President and many in his administration are unashamedly “pro-Marcos”; thus, even if this conviction is just a “taste of justice” (to use ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio’s words), it’s a very welcome one.

Still, it only took a couple of days before speculation ran rampant about how Mrs. Marcos would try to escape jail time. Would she take a cue from her predecessors and conveniently fall ill, with the necessary medical equipment taking the place of bags and heels as accessories? Politicians pleading poor health to escape incarceration have become an all too common phenomenon. It’s not unique to the Philippines, since high-profile convicts and peers abroad have pleaded convenient illness before, but here we’ve seen the charade so often that it’s no longer a surprise. When jokes circulated this week about the former first lady of the conjugal dictatorship reserving suite rooms in prime hospitals in Metro Manila, the jokes weren’t particularly funny because they sounded too much like the truth.

It’s true that incarceration does deprive many of access to healthcare that they might normally enjoy. The World Health Organization recognizes the special setting that is prison health, and acknowledges that prisoners tend to have poorer physical, mental and social health than the population at large; in resource-poor areas like the Philippines it can only be expected that the facilities wouldn’t be able to cater to the desires and needs of, say, an 89-year-old diva who’s been known to refuse to share elevators, never mind prison cells. But allowing the powerful or the wealthy to use health reasons to avoid jail time is something we should no longer tolerate, if we want justice to mean anything at all in this country.

Furthermore, it’s an insult to the integrity of health professionals whose priority is patient care. Their first obligation is to the patient, but this obligation doesn’t exist in a vacuum; like the ordinary citizen, physicians are political beings as well, and well aware of their social obligations and the role they might play in allowing convicts to escape accountability.

In the clinics, we’ve all encountered those would-be patients who ask for medical certificates requesting a week’s leave for the most minor of complaints, in a transparent attempt to get off work based on nothing but a physician’s word. Our politicians’ hypothetical illnesses would be no different, except that the stakes are higher, and what they’re trying to escape from isn’t just another week of work, but the long arm of the law.

They might also, to give them the benefit of the doubt, be truly ill — too ill to be imprisoned, but not quite too ill to run for office or to mingle at parties, both of which activities the former first lady has been known to do recently.

In an ideal world, efforts and resources should go toward making prisons a humane venue for health promotion, a just, professionally managed and effective extension of government, with readily available healthcare resources which would render moot our politician’s health-related excuses for avoiding jail time. This is sadly not the case, and any day now we expect yet another incarnation of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s neck brace in the news — either that or some other convenient phenomenon, like a disappeared vital document or a timely presidential pardon. Jail time should be the great equalizer, but as our colorful history shows, it can be anything but.

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