As of the close of regular office hours in government late yesterday afternoon, Alice Guo remained in a cell with 43 other inmates at the Pasig City Jail. The dismissed mayor of Bamban, Tarlac was transferred to the city jail female dormitory from the Custodial Center of the Philippine National Police at Camp Crame on orders of the Pasig City Regional Trial Court Branch 167, where Guo faces trial for qualified human trafficking, a non-bailable offense.
Guo’s camp, claiming threats to her life, wants her to stay at the PNP Custodial Center. Her transfer to the Pasig jail, which is under the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology, was briefly stalled when she was tested for suspected tuberculosis infection in her left lung. When the test result came out negative, she was moved to the BJMP facility.
BJMP officials have given assurance that inmates are safe in the local jails and Guo need not fear for her safety in the Pasig female dormitory. Both the BJMP and PNP are under the Department of the Interior and Local Government. Their detention facilities should be sufficiently secure to prevent escapes, while allowing for the humane treatment of inmates.
There’s no guarantee that Guo would be safer or more secure at Camp Crame, headquarters of the PNP, even if its chief and the DILG secretary posed for a selfie with her in Indonesia. High-risk detainees including kidnappers and drug traffickers have broken out of Camp Crame detention in the past years. In 2012 following a string of jailbreaks from police detention facilities around the country, a memorandum from the PNP chief at the time, Nicanor Bartolome, had noted that the Custodial Center at Camp Crame was already congested due to a rising number of high-risk inmates committed there. The memorandum pointed out that the Custodial Center is used only as “a temporary lock-up facility for persons under custodial investigation…”
In being cleared of TB, Guo lost an excuse to seek detention in her own cell, or better yet, “hospital arrest” – a favorite tack of VIP inmates who want to avoid incarceration in a crowded regular jail. She might yet complain of pain in her other lung. And she still has a long string of body parts that can be tested for illness requiring long hospital confinement. To foil attempts at special jailbird treatment, the PNP and BJMP must ensure that their regular jails are sufficiently equipped to keep all inmates secure.