EFFECTIVE next week, this column will bear a new title as I pay tribute to my 27 other co-prisoners in Cell # 12 of the Naga District Jail in Bgy. Del Rosario, Naga City. The tribute is especially dedicated to at least 16 or 17 of them who were there because they were unlearned or so poor, unable to hire competent lawyers or post bail, their plea of innocence or lesser crime notwithstanding.

As my loyal readers would have known, I was thrown in jail last July 20, 2005 after I was sentenced by a judge at RTC Branch 26 in Naga with a 90-day imprisonment and P30,000 fine for indirect contempt. On that bizarre day, it took only more than an hour that the judge heard my side to immediately serve the guilty verdict, wittingly or unwittingly without mention of any bail bond. The judge then hied off to Manila until 7 days later when he came back to hear my lawyer’s motion to fix bail for my temporary liberty.|

In short, this despotic judge wanted nothing less than locking me up in jail, throwing into the wind all my rights guaranteed by the court of law and the Constitution.

By sending me to what he thought was a hell-hole, this judge wanted to exalt in the face of a situation where I would break my spirit and make me give in and creep like a fetid animal. My crime was that I wrote the truth that in his sala there lays a motion that questions his integrity as a man worthy of his robe.

I remember the case of more renowned Manila-based lawyer-journalist Emil Jurado who in his newspaper column was relentless in his attacks against justices, both named and unnamed. Jurado was found guilty of contempt but he “received nothing more than a token fine of one thousand pesos, hardly an amount to deter obstinate critics”. Hah, this Jurado must be a lightweight compared to a provincial editor named Joe Perez who beats him by P29,000 in fine and 90 days in jail for simply reporting on a public document that pricked the sensibilities and perhaps the honor of an onion-skinned judge!

And this judge who wanted to growl like a tiger thought he was being vindicated by tossing me into a pit of murderers, robbers, drug pushers and rapists. On the contrary, as I’ve said before, a journalist that I am, I felt like a turtle thrown into the water. The jail is a most interesting place for a probing journalist who finds satisfaction in going where things happen, of becoming the first to know of strange places and situations, of being an insider, then seeing the product of my brain in print for others to know and eventually digest them to make this cruel world a better place to live in. To a journalist with ink in his hair, my stay in prison was a privileged situation that not just anyone can experience, except by becoming a prisoner himself, which becomes more dramatic if he’s innocent of a crime.

The Naga City District Jail, a two-time awardee as one of the best district jails in the country, is not a hell-house that many thought it otherwise. Under the stewardship of Major Samson Penilla, the jail warden, and his clean-cut assistant, Major Paulino Moreno, the jail guards at the NCDJ are well-disciplined. Ditto the inmates themselves who have learned to peacefully co-exist with their armed jailguards who require them at the very least to say “po” or “opo” when conversing with their superiors and guests.

Where the ideal ratio is 100 guards for every 300 prisoners, at NCDJ there are no more than 12 uniformed guards at a time for 306 prisoners. Nevertheless, there had been no reports about jailbreaks or riots even as prisoners roam freely outside their cells on designated periods from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. when they can receive visitors, play billiards and basketball, or bath their tattooed bodies under the sun.

Nothing you see in the movies or TV footages of Manila jails was there: such as the mayhem and slime of over-crowded cells; the stench of despair; the sound of whip or paddle on human flesh; or the probing searchlights at night. At times, though, I would see the smallness of man, especially when watching a fellow inmate whose pleasure is to loiter no farther than the open length of a 4-hectare penal farm, or eat no more than a cup of rice on every meal. To a bum who sleeps in the open spaces of the centro when the hustle and the bustle of the city stopped to call it a day, the district jail is a paradise for him for there he is assured of three meals a day, plus the usual dole-outs from religious and charitable groups that visit the jail alternately every month, not to mention the regular Sunday Mass by Fr. Rooney, S. J. of the Ateneo and the spiritual guidance by the Couples for Christ and seminarians who normally bring with them bread and other goodies for the prisoners.

While they confided their crimes to me — murder, theft and robbery, estafa, rape, and drug pushing — such defilements did not blur my heart to see some degree of ‘decency’ among the convicts, their humbled manners, their adherence to a code (there is honor among thieves, you know), and desperate humanity, as opposed to the almost unrelieved swinishness of a judge whose integrity was put in question because of alleged bribe money dangled by a complainant-heir in a case whose greed is taking away the noble legacy that his adoptive grandparents 50 years ago had intended to bequeath to the city.

More next issue.