(Business World) THE PHILIPPINE Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday said it is considering building a modern maximum-security prison for heinous crime convicts in a country known for having the world’s most crowded jails.
At a Senate hearing streamed live on Facebook, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin C. Remulla proposed to transfer the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa City to Nueva Ecija province in the country’s north.
“If it’s a maximum-security prison, then let’s make it a world-class maximum-security prison in the sense that the security features in that prison should be modern,” Senator Aquilino Martin D. Pimentel III said.
As of 2017, the Philippines had 933 jails — seven national prisons and 926 city, district, municipal and provincial jails that are not enough to contain inmates, three-quarters of whom are at the pretrial stage, the World Prison Brief said on its website.
The local Commission on Human Rights has repeatedly flagged the worsening congestion in the country’s jails, more recently because of the high and sudden influx of arrested suspects in connection with ex-President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s war on drugs that has killed thousands… Read More
