Jailing 3 inmates per square-meter | Jarius Bondoc

30.1.19

Jailing 3 inmates per square-meter | Philstar.com: That was how the interior office reconstructed events to find out last week where the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) had gone wrong. Foremost in the list of lapses was entrusting keys to "trustees". It is barred by the BJMP manual of procedures, but happened just the same due to manpower shortage. That the detainees had guns – smuggled piece-by-piece buried in cooked-rice pots, according to a confessed escapee – also pointed to lax checks on visitors. Some say it also magnifies the BJMP’s lack of modern detection gadgets. And that the guards temptingly carried holstered handguns inside the jail corridors and were easily overpowered smacked of indiscipline and ill training. All this boils down, however, to an acute scarcity of funds for jail maintenance – a malady that afflicts all the country’s detention facilities.