by ADORA FAYE DE VERA
“Changing lives, building a safer nation.” We wear this ubiquitous slogan on our shirts every day. But we do not have to be reminded by shirts, because these changes are forced on us every moment of our waking and sleeping hours.
We are more or less 80 women at any given time in this prison. Ninety percent of us are “innocent until proven guilty” but that innocence is already subjected to deprivation of liberty while waiting for the slow wheels of justice to turn. Thus, our deprived lives have to live through these changes.
Separation from family and friends is the first change that hits one upon being jailed. For the Filipina who is very family-centered, this hits hard. The permitted thirty-minute visit by family members on weekends and Tuesday to Thursday afternoons are never enough. And because families have to work, because this place is inaccessible to the routes of public transportation, some families can afford to visit only once or twice a month. That is, families from Iloilo City and nearby towns. What about families in Northern Iloilo, Southern Iloilo, Antique or Aklan? Negros or Cebu? or in Metro Manila, like mine?
The overwhelming majority here are mothers, mostly of school-age children who are suddenly thrust into the care of unprepared relatives, so they can visit only outside school hours. Children below five are not allowed to visit at all. As a senior citizen, I have been a shoulder to cry on for mothers who never get over being separated from their children, or young girls who miss their mothers. Cousins and friends have to ask permission every time from the Regional BJMP hierarchy located in another office. This, despite the Nelson Mandela that say “Prisoners shall be allowed, under necessary supervision, to communicate with their family and friends at regular intervals: [a] by corresponding in writing and using, where available, telecommunications, electronic, digital and other means, and [b] by receiving visits” (Rule 50).
The Bangkok Rules also state that “women prisoners contact with their families, including their children, and their children’s guardian and legal representatives shall be facilitated by all reasonable means…Visits involving extended contact with children should be encouraged, where possible” (Rules 26 & 28). “The Rule emphasizes the flexibility that needs to be demonstrated by prison administrations in applying visiting rules to women prisoners, in order to safeguard against the harmful impact of separation from families and children, in view of the fact that many women are imprisoned far away from their homes. This flexibility may, for example, include extending the lengths of visits, particularly when visitors have traveled long distances to visit” (Rule 26, commentary to the Bangkok Rules, UNODC 2009).
To familiarize the uninitiated, the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners was adopted by the UN more than 50 years ago and periodically updated until it was called the Nelson Mandela Rules. The Philippine government is a signatory of these Rules and the succeeding resolutions, including the UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners known as the Bangkok Rules, adopted in 2010. How do these rules translate to our changing lives? These translate into: “We have no facilities. We have no budget. We have no memo from above.”
Drinking water, rules or no rules, is a basic human right. It is also a basic moral obligation as old as the Bible, or even further back to Greek fables, to give water to the thirsty. But this seems lost here where drinking water is available only to those who have money. (Nelson Mandela Rules, Rule 22- Drinking water shall be available to every prisoner wherever he or she needs it). Because drinking water, they say, can not be accommodated by our 70-peso daily food budget that provides poverty rations of lugaw, miswa or laswa paired with 1.5 kilos per week of the cheapest rice.
Another change is the loss of privacy. In a cell full of 20 more women, anyone can see or hear what the other is doing, moreso because we are, prohibited from putting curtains on our bunks. No doors can be installed in the common toilet and bath, too. Our barred windows open to the street some hundred meters away where passersby can have their fill of watching women in various sleeping positions as lights are always on. There is absolutely no private space. Our 175 cm by 78 cm bunks, where we have to fit all our things from clothes to eating utensils, are searched regularly for suspected contraband which includes ballpens. Even our own bodies are not inviolate to pat-down searches which can be implemented any time.
Correspondence, of course, is routinely checked. There was a fine when a letter from my son was withheld, and another case when a painting I did was prohibited from going out. At times, my son has to memorize whole sections of my writings just to get past the censors.
Regimentation is necessary to maintain order and security in a facility where women from different backgrounds are involuntarily thrust together in close quarters day in and day out. Quarrels arise about the simplest of things, and the guards put these down as tempers flare. So, one can never choose what time to wake up, when to go to the grounds for sunning, when to hang or collect one’s laundry, or when to cook meals. Everything is decided by the guards. Again, the Nelson Mandela Rules which list: “the prison regime should seek to minimize any differences between prison life and life at liberty that tend to lessen the responsibility of prisoners or the respect due to their dignity as human beings.
At first glance, prison can look like an equalizer of sorts because everyone wears the same regulation yellow, follows the same prison regimen of waking up at 5:00 a.m. count-off, standing in line for the succeeding six to seven count-offs during the day, and being padlocked in the same cell at the same evening curfew. But it ends there.
Since individual prisoners must obtain their own beddings, electric fans, articles of personal hygiene, snacks and drinking water, the disparities are obvious. Those from well-to-do families, aside from having more and better things, get the services of private lawyers and post bail more easily upon court approval. They get more frequent visits, telephone their families for more supplies and get faster access to doctors and medicine when they get ill. They pay poorer prisoners to do the laundry, cook meals, carry drinking water from the ground floor, and replace them in assigned tasks such as cleaning the grounds or toilet.
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