Recto wants old, sick prisoners freed

MANILA, Philippines – Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto pressed yesterday for the release of old, ailing, and infirm prisoners to save on public funds.

Recto cited the yearly “board and lodging” expenses of one inmate in the country’s penal system in prodding President Duterte to push through with his plan to conditionally free convicts who will meet the requirements for executive clemency.

He said government spending for one prisoner in jail is far greater than what it spends to keep one student in school.

Every ailing or elderly Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) prisoner paroled or pardoned will save taxpayers P45,670 in annual costs to guard and feed him.

And taxpayers will save P87,178 annually if one Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) inmate, whose time spent behind bars is longer than the maximum jail time of the crime he had been charged with, will be released.

Annual average spending per inmate now runs at P73,910, almost three times the P23,775 the Department of Education spends per basic education student this year, the senator said.

Even government per capita spending for health, at P2,381 annually, is a mere 3.2 percent of what government spends yearly for a member of the “prison republic,” Recto said.

An inmate’s P1,825 yearly allowance for medicine is far greater than the P96 per capita budget of the Department of Health for medicines and vaccines this year, he added.

Per beneficiary, Recto said BJMP’s and BuCor’s combined food budget of almost P2.5 billion for 135,000 inmates is bigger than the P4.27 billion that the Department of Social Welfare and Development will spend to feed 2.1 million undernourished children this year.

He said the country’s jails currently house 135,000 inmates, almost four times their capacity, with some jails cramming five prisoners into one square meter of cell space.

To “house, feed, and guard” inmates, the government will spend almost P10.1 billion this year – P8.06 billion for BJMP, and P2 billion for BuCor, Recto said.

This will go up to P13.4 billion next year as government braces for a prison population boom resulting from its anti-drug campaign, he added.

The BJMP houses detainees awaiting trial and those who have been sentenced by the courts to not more than three years in jail, while those sentenced to more than three years and one day in prison are sent to BuCor.