Ben Madilynn
I’VE been serving persons deprived of liberty (PDLs) at the Davao City Jail Female Dorm for more than two years now.
Every Monday, we conduct the Meditation on Twin Hearts and do pranic healing on assigned PDLs. As our healing subjects, we get to listen to their stories of what brought them behind bars.
Most of them, drugs. The most common story being arrested and jailed because of their partners, men who deal and use drugs. It’s a story repeated over and over again, I sometimes could only sigh and say, “May you please choose better partners?”
Most of the time, too, their partners are at the male dorm next door.
Now on to the male dorm. I never ventured into that place. The last time I was there was when the female dorm was still an idea, and only to seek out erstwhile Mayor Rody Duterte who was visiting.
From tales told, it was worse than what I saw.
There are around 2,500 PFLs there on four-storey structures. It’s your typical jail – multi-level hammocks swinging from rafters.
Apparently, that’s the only way in these congested jails. Wooden beds are not used because these become breeding places of all kinds of pests, bedbugs among them. And those iron nails putting them all together easily become converted to weapons.
Linoleum mats for the floor are preferred in the female dorm where they can put these out under
the sun along with their pillows and bedsheets.
There is no such luxury for the males. So floors are bare to deny hiding places for pests again.
The cooling comfort of woven mats made of Romblon or Pandan leaves remain a dream. It will
never be allowed I was told. The reason?
Those men aren’t there because they’re good boys… and thus, vices are part and parcel of their existence.
Similar mats given by good-intentioned people in the past were dismantled, piece by precious tiny piece… to be smoked.
“Their addiction to vices is unimaginable. You’d see them scrounging for leaves, what tiny scrap of weed could creep out of crevices and cracks in the concrete ground become smoking material,” a jail officer said.
Indeed, what you sow, you reap. Mischief, misdemeanors, and crimes have been sown by many who remain nonchalant, as people today would describe it. Ergo, even their creature comforts are denied… with nonchalance.
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