EDITORIAL — Beaten behind bars

Our prisons have the bad reputation as places where those incarcerated leave jail as better criminals instead of people who have been rehabilitated and are ready to rejoin society.

Unfortunately, this reputation just got worse following the death of an inmate at the Cebu City Jail who was allegedly beaten to death.

Inmate Fernando Abapo Prajes died in the jail last April 26, more than a month after being committed on charges of statutory rape involving an 11-year-old girl.

While his death certificate indicated that he died of cardiac arrest, the National Bureau of Investigation said he actually died of blunt force trauma. The bureau said there were signs of abuse as well as defensive wounds on his body.

We won’t condone what Prajes did. Rape is already a heinous crime; the rape of a minor is even more so.

With that said, Prajes didn’t deserve to die the way he did either, if blunt force trauma --meaning a savage beating-- was really the way he went.

Some people might say he got justice. That people like him don’t deserve to go back to society after what he did. We say they have a fair point.

But if we were to resort to this kind of behavior --the deliberate and violent ending of a life at the hands of attackers-- then we would be no better than savages or beasts devoid of reason.

But then again, we aren’t even sure that Prajes was beaten for what he did to that girl. He had been in the jail for a month already. Prison society doesn’t follow the same rules as the world outside. Behind bars, looking at someone the wrong way, using the wrong facilities or items, or doing anything that can be interpreted as disrespectful to someone influential can get you in trouble.

There’s always the possibility that he was killed for doing something else.

If this was the case then things in our prisons are worse than we initially thought.