‘COVID-19 time bomb’

A potentially catastrophic public health problem is threatening to engulf the country’s notoriously overcrowded prisons and jails, where social distancing is virtually impossible and thus perfect grounds for the spread of the highly infectious COVID-19.

President Duterte reported last Monday that, so far, there are no confirmed COVID-19 cases in any of the facilities of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) nationwide. But given the horrific conditions of the country’s prison system, chances are high that the numbers will turn ugly in an instant.

As of April 7, there are 76 persons deprived of liberty (PDLs) and 81 BuCor personnel being monitored for symptoms of the coronavirus, and have been isolated from the rest of the prison population.

The Bureau of Jail Management and Penology also admitted that a male detainee may have died last week from COVID-19, thus the “triple efforts” to observe health protocols and isolate other detainees who could have contracted the disease.

Isolated and quarantined may be an overstatement, however, as the country’s penal system—overloaded in part as a result of the Duterte administration’s all-out war against illegal drugs, and lately by arrests made of quarantine violators — is the perfect petri dish for the pandemic, with prisoners packed worse than sardines.

Even before the first COVID-19 cases were reported in January this year, the Philippines already held the ignoble title of having the most congested prison system in the world at an eye-popping rate of 463.6 percent, according to the World Prison Brief of the London-based Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research.

The country’s penal facilities that combine those of BuCor, which houses convicted criminals, and the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, for those on trial or pre-trial, are bursting at the seams with 215,000 prisoners as of November 2019, crammed in facilities that are designed to accommodate only 40,610 people.

Put another way, four to five detained persons are cramped in a space designed for one detainee.

It may just be a matter of time before a massive outbreak ensues, thus the rising call by lawmakers and various groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch for the Duterte administration to release on humanitarian grounds inmates detained or convicted for low-level and nonviolent offenses, as well as older prisoners and those with underlying medical conditions.

“Failure to act now could result in a serious outbreak in the country’s jails and prisons, threatening the lives of prisoners whose health the authorities have a duty to protect,” stressed Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

The good conduct time allowance law passed in 2013 sought to address the appalling situation in the country’s correctional facilities, but its objective to help decongest jails by releasing prisoners for good behavior was undermined by the “freedom for sale” scam at BuCor, which has left the program dead in the water for now.

The advocacy group Prisoners’ Enhancement and Support Organization Inc. has likewise urged the President to declare a “prison and jail emergency” and release nonviolent elderly prisoners, as well as low-risk detainees and those who are about to complete their sentences — essentially the same call made by the justice committee of the House of Representatives, which also called for an ad hoc panel to be created to “immediately evaluate the situation of all provincial, city, and municipal jails, and other detention facilities, and to establish guidelines and procedures for the temporary release of qualified PDLs for humanitarian reasons” amid the pandemic.

Political prisoners have joined the clamor by urging the Supreme Court to order their release on humanitarian considerations through bail or recognizance. “Needless to say, the continued incarceration of petitioners who are sick and elderly would be a virtual death sentence,” said 23 elderly, sick, or pregnant political prisoners.

With the pandemic still to hit its peak in the Philippines, there is no time to lose. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism underlines the extraordinary threat in its report “Philippine Jails are a Covid-19 Time Bomb”: “The risks… are not just that the prisoners will infect each other. Eventually, jail and prison officers will have to go home, take a rest, and recharge. When that happens, corrections staff will be exposed to the coronavirus and risk infecting the prisoners when they return. As one jail official told Narag [Raymund Narag, an associate professor at Southern Illinois University and an expert in Philippine jails], ‘One miss, we all die.’”