EDITORIAL - More suggestions to improve our jails

If the testimonies of more and more witnesses are to be believed, not all inmates of the New Bilibid Prisons who were reported to have died from illness did; they were murdered. 

This according to Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla.

“A lot of people are going to my office, sending word about news. So little by little, until we get the name of the person, then we have them interviewed properly. Of course we have to go through the process. We vet the information before we act on it,” Remulla said in a report in Philstar.com.

We have voiced our suspicions that the death of some prominent and notorious inmates was suspect; their sudden demise came at a really convenient time for some parties, the deaths also happened when COVID-19 could be used as a convenient excuse, not to mention their remains were quickly disposed of before any autopsy could be conducted.

Or if an autopsy was conducted, there were people who questioned the results or who actually conducted those autopsies and how.

There are proposals to improve the conditions in our jails. In a previous editorial, we put forward the suggestions to improve record-keeping to make sure we know where a certain prisoner is all the time, and to make our prisons places where inmates can actually get reformed instead of becoming even better criminals.

It looks like we’ll have to add to that suggestion; the ability or specialty to determine the real cause of death of people who die behind bars.

We have to admit that making our jails safer is a tough nut to crack. In that case the next best thing is to make sure those who commit murder in jail are found. And the first step to that is to determine who died naturally and who didn’t.

Here is yet another suggestion; we make sure our prisons offer proper dignity for the dead. Just last month some 60 unclaimed bodies of inmates who died in Bilibid were buried recently, some after months of “languishing” at a funeral parlor.

We were not able to give them dignity when they were still alive, considering how some inmates live in squalor and neglect. Let us at least offer them some in death.