Corrupted system
In the end, the initially shocking jacuzzi, wide-screen TV sets, split-type air-conditioning units, music studio with sophisticated equipment, luxury watches and footwear, even the life-size sex doll, found in the quarters of drug convicts in the national penitentiary boil down to this: They are of a piece with the corrupted system that has also made possible the plunder of public funds by government officials including lawmakers, their enablers in various agencies, and private persons who have skillfully mapped out the labyrinthine ways of wholesale thievery.
This is what’s going on under this administration that officially tries mightily to hew to an anticorruption campaign, and which hooligans and other lowlifes have reduced to running in circles. Justice Secretary Leila de Lima may be “beyond disgusted” at what she discovered in the early-morning Monday raid on the sleek lodgings of drug lords in the New Bilibid Prison, but it’s a fact that this state of affairs has been in place for quite some time, under that very nose that appears quick to sniff out irregularities. As early as November 2012, for example, she was “dismayed and angry” that certain inmates were keeping, in blatant violation of prison rules, high-end mobile phones, chargers, battery and signal enhancers, LAN cables, USB broadband units, SIM and SD cards, Wi-Fi routers, and CCTV cameras.
That, in the Monday raid, five cell phones as well as laptops were also found among convicted drug lord Peter Co’s belongings proves that, for all De Lima’s expressed outrage, for all the confiscations and guard reshuffles ordered, things go back to “normal” at the NBP after every inspection that authorities are forced to carry out when the situation gets hot. “It now appears [that the contraband found] is just the tip of the iceberg,” she told reporters after the raid. Don’t we know it.
Set aside for the moment the “discovery” that the drug convicts are living a life of luxury, which is certainly reprehensible in itself not only in view of the grinding poverty that governs the existence of most of the prison population including those in the city jails, but also because they are supposed to be atoning for their terrible crime. Earlier reports on the special arrangements of such wealthy convicts as former congressman Romeo Jalosjos (child rape) and former governor Antonio Leviste (homicide), among others, have given the public an idea of what money can make possible even behind bars.
What’s worrisome is that top-of-the-line communication devices were in full employ at the NBP—we use the past tense to indicate faith that the prevailing situation has been upended, if only for now—to the extent that signal boosters and Wi-Fi antennae were in place to trump the signal jammers installed by prison authorities. It means that, despite their conviction and incarceration, drug lords were not only plying their trade in the penitentiary (white stuff believed to be shabu were found, along with wads of cash), but also controlling the drug industry that has destroyed countless lives, both young and old, and continues to make of their families’ lives an enduring misery. What is this but an in-your-face smirk, in fact a dirty finger, at the government and its laws, at the administration and its anticorruption campaign?
The system has corrupted not only Bureau of Corrections personnel but also the other prisoners, who are said to jockey among themselves for the privilege of “protecting” the drug lords in exchange for the wealthy (and therefore esteemed) ones’ patronage that allows most of the prisoners to keep body and soul together. It’s a thriving society out there, a community of users, in effect, with the top tier adroitly pulling the strings to keep the serfs busy—until the next tip-off to authorities and the next overhaul. (What was that Sartre once said? “Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”)
Heads will roll, De Lima has predictably announced. As well they should. She can axe them all—including BuCor Director Franklin Bucayu and his estimation of contraband as “bad per se” and “not per se bad but prohibited”—and put others in their place, but if that system of patronage and corruption is not clinically studied and addressed, she will constantly be, or beyond, a state of disgust. To clean up that approximation of the Augean stables, what is needed is—dare we say it?—the river of revolution.
