MANILA, Philippines — Interior Secretary Eduardo Año blamed the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) on Monday for the messed up list of convicts released on good conduct who should be rearrested.
Año said the rearrest of convicts believed to have been erroneously released due to the Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) law has been put on hold pending the submission of BuCor of a “clean list” of convicts who should be rearrested by the police.
He said the BuCor was still validating the list, which contained the names of convicts released due to executive clemency and parole and not due to the GCTA law.
“BuCor is the real culprit here. They don’t have good records. They don’t have a good list,” he said, speaking partly in Filipino, in a press briefing in Camp Crame in Quezon City.
Año said he had ordered the Philippine National Police, an attached agency of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), to wait for the updated list from BuCor before it could continue rearresting released convicts of heinous crimes.
“But the monitoring and tracking of these people will continue. The moment we get the clean list then we effect the arrest of those still unaccounted,” he added.
Last Sept. 4, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the arrest of nearly 2,000 heinous crime convicts released due to the GCTA law since they were supposed to be excluded from reduced prison sentence based on good conduct while in jail term.
The arrests started on Sept. 20, after the 15-day grace period ended on Sept. 19, but it was temporarily suspended pending the validating of the list.
As of Friday morning, a total of 2,009 convicts freed on good conduct, including convicts of non-heinous crimes, have surrendered to authorities, according to the Department of Justice.
This is even higher than the 1,914 heinous crime convicts in the initial list of BuCor.
READ: DOJ: 2,009 GCTA-freed prisoners have surrendered