(First of two parts)

Like many other inmates at Manila City Jail, Baste is a “balikbayan” — someone who has done time before.

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The others are proud of the distinction, but the 32-year-old from the slums of Santa Mesa lacks the grit associated with recidivists.

It’s because in his two arrests — the first in December 2017 and then in April this year — he says he was plucked off the street by plainclothes policemen and accused of “shabu” (crystal meth) possession.

Both times he was clean, he swears. But both times he was charged with drug possession.

President Rodrigo Duterte had ordered the intensification of the war on drugs, later expanded to cover drinking in public, going around shirtless, and — like Baste on his second arrest —

simply being in the street at night.

But for Baste, being in the city jail is paradise compared to the police detention centers where arrested suspects are held pending commitment orders from the courts.

Tinderboxes

These lockups have become tinderboxes, with hundreds of men crammed in cells that can barely hold a dozen.

The unbearable congestion has led Baste and others like him to actually prefer potentially yearslong commitment in jail over temporary detention, where the men are transformed from humans to masses of tattooed flesh that eat, sleep and defecate in the same space.

At the Santa Cruz Police Station where Baste was temporarily held, he slept for weeks sitting upright, hands around his knees, while 20 other inmates took turns lying down in a cell built for eight.

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A riot could break out if he so much as jostled a sleeping inmate.

With no one to bring him food, he sometimes had to make do with bread saved from the others’ leftovers, which he had to share with those who had nothing to eat.

The air was thick with body heat and the acrid smell of sweat.

In the streets, Baste was a scavenger who subsisted on scraps. But his stay at the Santa Cruz Police Station was worse, he says.

It was President Duterte “who changed my life,” he says. “If not for him, I wouldn’t have had to go through that.”

As high as 612 percent

The twin crackdowns by the Philippine National Police on drug suspects and violators of city ordinances this year swelled the number of arrests, straining scant resources in both police cells and jails and subjecting detainees to inhumane conditions.

In the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) jails alone, congestion rates go as high as 612 percent nationwide.

In Metro Manila, those with the highest number of inmates are the Manila and Quezon City jails, which hold around 5,000 and 3,600 inmates — or congestion rates of 900 and 450 percent — respectively.

Most of the inmates are charged with drug possession or sale, or both — but a number claim being framed by police to rack up the PNP’s arrest numbers.

But while congestion in BJMP jails is indeed severe, the figures don’t quite reflect the inmates’ relative freedom of movement.

At Manila City Jail, the yellow-clad inmates are allowed free rein on the 3.6-hectare lot, where they can play basketball and interact with others.

The inmates of Quezon City Jail don’t get as much room, but at daytime they can leave their cells and stretch their legs in the open court on the ground floor.

Each is assured meals — often peasant food like meatless arroz caldo (porridge) — thrice daily despite the BJMP’s meager budget of P60 per inmate per day, according to the bureau’s spokesperson, Senior Insp. Xavier Solda.

The overcrowding only becomes apparent at night, when the inmates have to return to their brigades.

It’s a tangle of bodies on the cold concrete, either in the cells or outside in the open air, as each fights for every inch of space to sleep.

Hole in the ground

With the war on drugs on hyperdrive, police are racking up more arrests faster than the courts can issue orders for the suspects’ transfer to BJMP jails, Solda said.

The result? Incendiary conditions that make this judicial purgatory worse than jail for the inmates.

Such was the case of Gil, 41, who was arrested in July by officers from the Barbosa precinct (also covered by the Santa Cruz station) as he was getting off work at an e-bingo boutique on Recto Avenue.

A first-timer with no visitors, Gil landed at the bottom of the pecking order when he was transferred to Santa Cruz.

For days he ate and slept in the “restroom,” which essentially was a small corner of the cell separated by a low concrete wall.

A hole in the ground made for a toilet, and a PVC hose hanging from the ceiling made for a shower.

Sleeping meant lying down on the concrete floor, wet with water seeping from the restroom.

In time Gil learned to tie his clothes to the cell bars to make a hammock—a reprieve from the sea of flesh below.

“I pity myself often,” he says, voice cracking with emotion. “Things are just so bad.”

Where it went wrong

The problem is that PNP detention centers are meant to be temporary holding places only. Thus, each police precinct or station has limited funds, sometimes none, for longer-term needs such as medicines.

Supt. Erwin Margarejo, former spokesperson for the Manila police, said budgets for PNP detention centers were often based on the ideal capacity of those places, not on the actual number of inmates.

The budget for daily food, for example, is often around P30 per inmate.

This means that detainees are largely dependent on visitors to provide them with resources.

Plea bargaining

The BJMP has put in place certain measures to ease congestion, Solda said.

One is plea bargaining, a recent Supreme Court framework that would allow small-time drug suspects to cut their jail time and undergo rehab instead.

Another is the “good conduct, time allowance” policy, a behavioral incentive to cut jail time if the inmate pursues further studies, or attends technical-vocational or values-development programs.

These measures have led to the release of 59,625 inmates nationwide in the last 10 months, Solda said.

More important, he said, these weren’t mere measures to help decongest the jails; these allowed inmates to be reintegrated into society and prevented them from being recidivists.

“Balikbayan” Baste says he has made his decision: “They always tell us to just admit to the crime, to which we always say, ‘But why would we do that?’ But many of us take the plea bargaining just to get out.”

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