Gabriel will not be made to suffer for Michael’s sin.
Of this, Bureau of Corrections Director General Gregorio Pio Catapang Jr., assured the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights during a remote public hearing yesterday at the New Bilibid Prison compound in Muntinlupa City.
Catapang said privileges accorded to persons deprived of liberty will not be curtailed just because detainee Michael Angelo Cataroja was able to escape.
Cataroja was rearrested last week in Angono, Rizal after going missing from the NBP last 7 July. The PDL said he escaped out of boredom because he didn’t get any visitors ( ).
The BuCor chief gave the assurance to committee chairperson Sen. Francis Tolentino after Senator Robin Padilla asked if PDL privileges, like visits, would be suspended.
However, BuCor will not allow overnight conjugal visits or overnight visits by immediate relatives like parents and children, Catapang said.
An ex-convict interviewed by Daily Tribune said that aside from food riots, widespread discontent among detainees may result if the curtailment of conjugal visits lasts.
The overnight visits will resume once BuCor has finished assessing the weaknesses they have seen, including those that were exploited by Cataroja in making good his escape.
Freedom dash
The BuCor board is investigating how Cataroja was able to escape from the country’s biggest and most overcrowded prison facility.
In a reenactment over the weekend, Cataroja showed the board how he copied the logo stamped on the hands of visitors using ink to pass himself off as one before clambering into the undercarriage of a garbage truck serving the facility.
Padilla told Catapang it would be unfair to other PDLs if they were made to suffer because Cataroja’s escape embarrassed the BuCor, an agency under the Department of Justice that oversees the prisons and penal farms in the country.
Cataroja’s disappearance prompted a search that led to the discovery of bones inside a prison septic tank, thought at first to be human but later identified as chicken.
He was also reported to have been beheaded and his body was kept at the Sigue-Sigue Sputnik Gang dormitory. The report was later dubbed “fake news” by Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla.
In 1994, Padilla was sentenced to a maximum of eight years in prison after being convicted of illegal possession of firearms. He was pardoned in 1998 by President Fidel Ramos.
Recently, Padilla’s visit to a high-end gun store in Taguig City, where he showed off his gun collection, opened a debate about whether a person who had been convicted of a crime is allowed by law to own a firearm.
The matter has largely gone unresolved, with some lawyers saying the Philippine National Police is barred from issuing a firearms license to those who have been convicted of a crime like Padilla.
“We will tighten that, but the privileges will not be gone,” said Catapang in Filipino of the situation at the NBP.