n the island of Cebu in the Philippines, there are two jails. One is a third-world nightmare hell on earth full of happy, relaxed people. The other is a thoroughly modern facility where all the inmates are hateful, twitchy, and basically traumatized.
Bagong Buhay Rehabilitation Center is a 30-year-old prison designed to house about 250 prisoners. It’s currently holding 1,600. The prison is so packed that there’s not enough room for everyone to lie down at once, so the prisoners sleep in shifts, mostly three to a pile on tiny makeshift cots called cobols that are made out of rice sacks and wood scrap.
It’s also too full to close the prison doors, so the prisoners just clamber around as they please—murderers, embezzlers, bandits, and perverts rubbing shoulders and holding master classes. Apparently, it’s calmed down a lot since about 900 drug addicts were moved to a separate facility down the road.
Like a lot of prisons in the Philippines, the BBRC is built on the old colonial model: A square of dirt with a big wall around it. It’s a madhouse. The guards won’t set foot in the place unless they’re in a pack of 20 and covered by sharpshooters on the walls.
Plumbing is non-existent. There’s never enough food, and the best time to shower is when it rains. It sounds like the perfect example of the worst prison on earth, but it’s actually not so terrible. Because there are no guards—really—the prisoners have to organize things for themselves. They do this along cellblock lines. Although the doors to the cells are never closed, the prisoners operate under the rubric of 13 cellblocks, or brigades, with between 100 and 200 members to each 100-square-meter “home cell.”
Every cellblock elects its own bosyo, or mayor, whose job is to keep the peace and solve problems for the prisoners. He gets medicine for the sick, helps fill out paperwork, and organizes ritual beatings for prisoners who get out of line. The beatings are not too brutal, though, because any prisoner can just go join another cellblock if he feels hard done by. Basically, a bosyo characterized it to me like this: “If they step out of line, I spank the butt.”
This was taken from Vice Magazine. A modern day, commercialized, Tibor Kalman with a little more foot in your face. You can check out the rest of the article here.
Does this not say so much about the core of the human spirit as well as the screwed up institutions we have come to use to constrain and beat it with?
While traveling through Laos 4-5 years ago, I wanted to go to stay on this island in the middle of this man-made lake. Apparently, after creating some dam, the government flooded this entire valley (accidentally or not, I’m not sure) thus creating a lake that ranged from 5 to maybe 30 feet deep throughout. You can think of it more as a really huge puddle. Anyway, the story goes that the government then decided to send all the prostitutes and thieves arrested to the islands created by the high-points in this valley. Bear in mind that this was all in the 50’s/60’s so they had long since died and/or swam away, but I had heard that there was still an island on which it was possible to stay and there were some people who could take me out to it via their motorized dug-out canoe. I wont go into the entire story of that night (because A. that’s not the point of this story and B. it would take FAR too long) but lets just say I ended up having a crazy night staying with a bunch of squatters who had taken up home in this old, dilapidated-as-hell/falling over, speak-easy type restaurant/old motel. It was a ridiculous experience. The point though is that these islands, filled with con-men and thieves, and hoes, and what-have-you, developed their own little island-specific towns and cultures. They built their own restaurants and ‘bars’ and whatever else. Just like the prison-system described in that Vice article. Sure, people probably tussled and some people may have killed each other, but that’s life (and death) and it didn’t happen so much that it destroyed their culture. Those delinquents were probably dealt with (‘spank the butt’?). The fact remains that those ‘terrible’ people still created something that worked and still cooperated and trusted enough to build things and make some community work. They didn’t just all freak out and stab each other in the face. Plus, they probably had a better life and learned more than what would have happened had they been put into some monolithic concrete jail-monster with I’ll-put-the-fear-of-god-into-you-because-I-can type of guards.
All this is visible in aforementioned jail in the Philippines.
And furthermore, I think this is the same jail (Note: Nope, not the same jail. This jail is Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center – CPDRC. Don’t know if it’s the ‘other’ jail they speak of in the article…I’ll pretend it isn’t.)
I remember seeing the Thriller performance (choreography is stellar in this one) a ways back, but I just couldn’t resist this one.
Thriller! Soulja Boy! MC Hammer! DANCING! In prison!
What are we doing America?
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world at 737 persons imprisoned per 100,000. Here, more than 1 in 100 adults are now confined in an American jail or prison. We have about 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s incarcerated population….
In the past number of years people have gotten pretty heated over the privatization of prisons. Those for privatization argue cost reduction, whereas the arguments against it focus on standards of care, and whether a market economy for prisons might also lead to a market demand for prisoners (tougher sentencing for cheap labor).
Private companies which provide services to prisons form the American Correctional Association, which advocates legislation favorable to the industry…..
Housing one prisoner usually costs a state between $18,000 and $31,000 every year, $33 per day for the average prisoner and $100 per day for an ‘elderly’ prisoner…
What the fuck, yo?
SumtinK 