50 non-GCTA inmates freed, says DOJ

MANILA, Philippines — Nearly 60 persons deprived of liberty (PDLs) and who are among those who surrendered under the good conduct time allowance (GCTA) were released by the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) on Friday, an official said yesterday.

Undersecretary Markk Perete, spokesman for the Department of Justice (DOJ), said the BuCor released the first two batches of 52 PDLs after they were found to have been freed on good faith.

The BuCor first released those who are residing in Metro Manila and arranged the transportation for those who are from the provinces.

To ensure that these persons will no longer be bothered by the Philippine National Police (PNP), the BuCor provided each one of them with certificates stating the date and basis of their release.

Their names will also be removed from the cleaned-up list of PDLs who did not surrender and will be re-arrested by the PNP starting Oct. 1.

Aside from the 58 released PDLs, Perete said that a DOJ-BuCor joint task force has verified the release of the next batch of at least 87 inmates.

Before the PDLs’ release, Perete said the task force deliberated on whether an inmate could be freed or not before they present the report to the oversight committee.

“Both the joint task force and oversight committee evaluate the list based on several factors such as if a surrenderee was acquitted or granted parole or commutation of sentence and if his case is not excluded from the benefits provided under Republic Act 10592,” Perete said.

“If a PDL meets the first set of criteria, he will be included in the release list. If not, his case will be included in the list for second pass evaluation. If after two evaluations, a PDL’s case is confirmed excluded,” he added.

Once a PDL is excluded, the list will be sent back to the joint task force for re-computation of service of sentence to assess how much time remains un-served.

More than 2,000 inmates have surrendered to authorities after President Duterte ordered them to turn themselves in as they were erroneously freed under the GCTA law.

Separate facility

Senate President Vicente Sotto III has expressed support for the creation of a separate facility for heinous crime convicts to prevent them from communicating with people outside the penal institution.

Sotto’s Senate Bill 1055 aims to stop all illegal activities in all penal institutions nationwide, particularly at the New Bilibid Prison where convicted drug lords managed to continue their illegal activities.

“With the overwhelming revelations on the state of corruption in the Bureau of Corrections, the appalling condition of our inmates and the poor quality of our prison facilities, there is no appropriate time to correct these but now,” Sotto said in a speech co-sponsoring Senate Bill 1055.

Sotto, along with Majority Leader Migz Zubiri and Senators Richard Gordon and Ronald dela Rosa, are pushing for the construction of a more secure and state-of-the-art prison facility for law offenders serving sentence for heinous crimes.

“In light of the legislative inquiry and investigations, we now know that our system does not work,” Sotto said, adding that hardened criminals should not be in a position to aggravate those who still have hopes to be productive members of society.

“We must differentiate the system of rehabilitating the hopeless from the hopeful. Ihiwalay ang mga bulok na mangga sa mga bagong pitas (segregate the freshly-picked fruits from the rotten ones),” Sotto said.

Other than decongesting the existing penal institutions and accommodating the increasing number of inmates committed to the existing prisons and penal farms, the purpose of the bill, Sotto explained, is to prevent inmates from taking advantage of what he described as “lax general rules that allow high-level offenders to continue their nefarious activities.”

The maximum penal institutions, also called heinous crimes facilities, should be located in a secured and isolated place to ensure the safety and security of civilian communities and protect the facility from intruders.

The measure also seeks to regionalize these heinous crimes facilities by establishing maximum penal institutions in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao, preferably within a military establishment or on an island far from the mainland. – With Cecille Suerte Felipe