Expanding Jail Population Eats Up Budget for Health - Recto

Senator Ralph Recto has warned that the unabated expansion of the countrys prison population can literally be bad for ones health.

Recto said that the government spends more money for maintaining each prisoner or detainee than what it allocates for health services for every Filipino.

The number of detainees and prisoners is expected to reach 111,076 next year since it grows by 15 percent annually, draining the countys resources and forcing the administration to scrimp on other items in the national budget.

Recto revealed that the budget for every inmate is P38,712 while the Department of Health (DOH) spends only P272 per capita to sustain health services.

Our prison population growth rate is seven times bigger than the annual population growth rate of 1.95 percent, Recto said. Feeding, housing and guarding 76,306 inmates crammed in 427 Bureau of Jail Management and Penology-run jails will cost taxpayers P3.27 billion next year, Recto said. Caring for another 34,770 prisoners committed to seven Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) prisons and penal colonies will cost an additional P1.03 billion next year, Recto added, citing 2007 budget documents Malacanang has submitted to Congress. Persons being tried in courts or those already with light jail terms are sent to BJMP facilities while those sentenced for graver offenses are transported to Muntinlupa and six other BuCor prisons. The cost of keeping a detainee behind bars is a staggering P38,712 a year, Recto said. In comparison, our per capita health budget, using generous assumptions, is only P258 a year Keeping a student in school for a year, at a cost of P7,450, is a lot cheaper than keeping a person behind bars, he said , to referring to DepEds P134 billion budget for 18 million students next year. With more people ending up in jails of BJMP every year it handled 42,000 inmates in just 36 months sardine can-type accommodations in jailhouses is becoming more of an understatement. Recto illustrated this by citing these data: Total BJMP cell space is a mere 92,292 square meters nationwide, or a per prisoner jail space of 1.6 square meters. Literally, tig-isang dipa bawat preso, on the average, he added. On the BuCor front, five of the seven prisons are congested, with Muntinlupa, built for 8,700 but now home to 18,845, reporting a more than 200 percent overcapacity, he said. The growth of prison population triggers a corresponding growth in the budget of jail services, Recto said.

On the other hand, the P420 million proposed hike in the BJMP budget would allow it to buy more medicine (P19 million), food (P352 million), firearms and handcuffs (P16.5 million) and hire 500 additional guards (P95 million). But these new investments are not enough to cope with rising prison population, Recto said. Prisoners make do with a P40 daily food budget. In BuCor, there is only one guard per 24 prisoners, and in many BJMP jails, inmates sleep in shifts - and if not on the rafters, then by standing up. However, solving jail and prison congestion does not necessarily require the building of more jails, Recto pointed out. It should be a confluence of several moves.

We should declog courts of cases. Lower courts ended 2004 with 776,529 pending cases. With 376,889 added in 2005, the total cases handled by lower courts reached an all-time high of 1,219,706 that year, he said. We should also slowly adopt, even on a pilot basis, community service as alternative to detention, or as a way of reducing jail time. We can tap millions of manhours for city sanitation activities, even in the building of infrastructure, Recto concluded.