The F Word

By Vida Soraya Verzosa

At the Quezon City Jail, I conquered my fear. My four letter F word today is about that debilitating feeling that creeps into the souls of the unprepared, insecure and the distrustful: fear.

I walked into the QC jail this morning, together with the other interns of the Ateneo Human Rights Center, with a feeling of having to conquer my biases about detention prisoners. When I was first asked over the summer what sector I was totally averse to, I replied, without skipping a beat, that I disliked the jail. No matter how persuasive the presentation of the Humanitarian Legal Assistance Foundation was during the Basic Orientation Seminar, I couldn't get over the mental picture of menacing hoodlums tattooed all over, reeking of compounded sweat and human waste, sporting bloodshot eyes and battlescars from gang riots. Stories of how congested the jails were didn't help any. Even if my co-intern from Zamboanga shared how much she learned during her internship experience, I was undeterred. With all my bourgeois squeamishness, I still found the thought of getting within 10 feet of accused detainees as something outside the radar of my desire to embody the Ignatian spirit of being a (wo)man for others. 

Until I decided to attend the Paralegal Training (PLT) that morning. The night before, my stomach resembled a Gordian knot as I asked questions on how we were supposed to conduct it. When we arrived at the facility managed by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP), my heart began to palpitate. I felt so horribly unprepared! I was certain that Murphy's Law would operate anytime soon. However, when a wave of humid, EDSA-polluted air suffused with human smells hit me as we queued in, I realized that it wasn't as bad as I imagined it to be. I didn't keel over and pass out. I wasn't instantly taken hostage like in a Prison Break scenario. I didn't get catcalls and rude comments one expects from jail movies of the 1980s.

In fact, I felt so ashamed at how prejudiced I was about their plight. My thinking was warped into the paradigm that since they committed felonies, they ought to rot behind bars. I hated my Criminal Law 1 exams since they were so pro-accused to my mind, even if we had the best Crim professor in the entire law school. I frowned at those who advocated for the abolition of capital punishment, convinced that there should be harsher penalties for hooligans, in addition to divine retribution. In a way, I was also boxed into the mentality that these men were evil creatures who were meted out just punishment for their acts (and omissions) no matter how inhumane the conditions were. How wrong was I. For all we know, a significant percentage of those incarcerated really deserve to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. After all, they were just that. Accused. Most of the newly-committed haven't even seen their attorneys, much less, convicted of the offenses charged. 

As I began to talk about the rights of the accused, my assigned topic for that PLT, our audience, a streetsmart group of around 20 detention prisoners, transformed into something that made my initial fears seem like an absurdity. The laws became more than inscribed words that I had to methodically scribble onto a bluebook during exams. They began to represent the difference between human rights violations and liberty for those who were accorded due process. The disparity between the utopian vision of a world where justice prevails and the reality of how deprived the detainees were was a starkly drawn contrast.

By the time the other interns were discussing Criminal Procedure, the provisions of the Revised Rules of Court began to make sense as the detainees raised questions about their personal circumstances and how they could eventually be released. I was amazed at how intelligent they really were, since they actually knew more about their cases than I could possibly understand from hardbound volumes accumulating dust in my bookshelf. The questions a professor hurls at you during recitation can hardly compare to being asked real life legal advice from someone whose freedom was at stake. 

After the PLT, the BJMP warden's staff toured us around the detention facility. It resembled a self-contained community, albeit worlds apart from the Rockwell center. There were stores, a mini-library, medical clinic, chapel, school, basketball court, gym, study area, crafts corner and even a barbershop. There was an Iglesia ni Cristo samba on the 2^nd floor while the Sputnik gang played basketball on the first floor. A Chinese TV show blared out Mandarin dialogues from the cell of Chinese detainees while "pupils" in a literacy program learned how to write letters to their loved ones outside. There was a framed and autographed picture of Mark Herras, dedicated to his father, one celebrity dad out of the over 3, 000 inmates crammed into a space built for 800.

There was really nothing to fear but my own preconceived notions and my tendency to consider those accused in a criminal proceeding as people to be regarded with suspicion and, worse, condemned to undergo a difficult process of defending one's liberty. I, like the rest of the Philippine population, was ignorant of the flipside to every story behind a criminal complaint. My hope and my prayer is for our country's leaders to eventually see that the way we treat the least of our (detained) brothers and sisters, is a reflection of how our society (de)values human life. 

What comes to mind now is the first line from an oft-performed Joey Ayala song: "'Diba tayo'y narito, upang maging malaya, at upang palayain ang iba…" In that sense, one could really see the dual role that lawyers and paralegals play in transforming fear to that which we all cherish yet oh so easily take for granted until it is violently curtailed: freedom.
Pinoy Era

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