One of the unique events of Cebu’s Fiesta Señor is the visit of the image of the Holy Child to men and women in prison.
This meeting of devotion and justice (penitentiaries are spaces set apart for those who have been brought to justice for their offenses) can give us new eyes with which to view prisoners.
Our view of inmates has for a long time been conditioned by Hollywood or Tagalog movies that showed harsh realities of being incarcerated.
With YouTube, convicts have been portrayed as entertainment figures. The dancing inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center collect millions of clicks of approval and draw curious tourists to watch their shows live in specially arranged performances.
The visit of the Santo Niño encourages us to take a more compassionate view of inmates and of the reality of imprisonment.
Jails are no chicken coops or cuckoo nests.
They go by names like correctional facility, which evokes a sense of turning a new leaf; penitentiary, whose root word is related to the virtue of patient long suffering; rehabilitation center, which brims with the idea that the good side of men and women can be rediscovered.
When Byron Garcia, the brother suspended governor Gwendolyn Garcia, threatened that a mass jailbreak could occur in protest of his sister’s ordeal, he revealed an antiquated view of prisoners as pawns.
The now annual visit of the Santo Niño de Cebu to inmates invites us to ponder what we can do to uplift conditions in jails.
We look forward to the day when drugs are no longer smuggled into prison, when inmates no longer turn up dead after a rumble, when children in conflict with the law are given full opportunity to be the good citizens they were supposed to be, and when we no longer project onto the incarcerated, the failure of society to help a fellow human being.