BuCor chief: Situation in state penitentiary like a ‘bomb waiting to explode’

New Bilibid Prison. INQUIRER.net file photo

MANILA, Philippines — The head of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) compared on Tuesday the condition inside the state penitentiary  to a “bomb waiting to explode.”

Bucor Director Franklin Jesus Bucayu said during the hearing of the Senate committee on justice joint with the committees on public order, family relations, and local government that  as of January 2015, the country’s inmate  population is now about  41,000.

More than half of  the population  or 23,000 prisoners, he said, were housed at the National Bilibid Prison (NBP).

“Built  in  1935 to accommodate 8, 500 inmates, at present, the NBP has a congestion rate  of 164 percent. In its maximum compound alone, which houses the high profile and high risk prisoners, the population has reached 14,500,”  Bucayu said.

Alarmingly, he said, the prison guard to inmate ratio was at its highest at 1:64 since the ideal ratio is 1:8.

Bucayu said the high ratio compromises  the most basic correctional responsibilities of managing prisons  and providing  inmates and jail guards the ample security and protection.

“With the increasing  inmate population rate of 4 percent over the last five years,  we can compare the situation inside the state penitentiary to a bomb waiting to explode. As I’ve sad earlier,  we have a state of emergency in our state penitentiary,” he pointed out.

The  Bucor chief then urged  legislators to immediately reform the  country’s prison  system and “adequately and substantially fund this reform measures embodied in the Bureau of Corrections  Modernization  Law, which was enacted  into law in 2013.

“Distinguished senators, your honors, we need to do now the steps we should have implemented many years ago to significantly improve  the NBP which is one of the largest in the world,” Bucayu said.

“We also need to confront squarely  the plight of the inmates and prison guards and the entire support system of the NBP,” he said, “Painful as it may be,  we need to bring dramatic changes and  improvements on the Bureau of Corrections and how it implements reforms  that will ensure that the Philippine prison system  complies with the basic international standards  at the very least.”

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