Commentary

Camp Bagong Diwa Massacre: A Reflection of U.S. Prison, Criminal Justice Systems

The Bagong Diwa massacre has exposed the extreme overcrowding, institutionalized corruption, administrative and staff incompetence and insufficient facilities that permeate the fledgling post-martial law Philippine national prison system. The treatment of prisoners at Camp Bagong Diwa is also comparable to that of prison facilities in the U.S.

BY DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
Contributed to Bulatlat

This particular rebellion reflects a profound—and arguably unprecedented—political opposition to the institutionalized dehumanization of the Philippine prison regime in the “post-martial law” period.

Resonating a recent and global lineage of anti-authoritarian and counter-state prison insurrections from Attica, New York, to Robben Island, South Africa, the Bagong Diwa uprising quickly swelled beyond the immediate proclamations of Limbong and Gapar.

The more than 100 prisoners revised Limbong’s and Gapar’s original demand of a speedy trial and a cessation of hostilities in Sulu and reissued four demands: freedom from bodily harm in the resolution of the standoff; timely and fair hearings of their collective cases; respect for human rights; and access to media in order to air long-standing grievances with the prison administration.

Recent historical context gives credence to these demands. In 2004, the Commission on Human Rights (an independent office established by the 1987 Constitution) named the PNP as the nation’s most consistent and flagrant abuser of human and civil rights. The November 2004 slaughter of a dozen striking sugar plantation workers in Tarlac province (central Luzon, north of Manila) capped a touchstone year of state-conducted and state-sanctioned political killings, including the open assassination of several progressive and radical activists, human rights workers and journalists.

Moreover, the Philippine government’s intensified campaign against drug users has resulted in a dramatic increase in the jail and prison population, as only 3.5 percent of those detained can afford to post bail, and most are forced to wait extremely long periods for their day in court.

Recent assessments by a number of state and non-governmental organizations have resoundingly revealed that Philippine prisons and jails lack basic infrastructure, and are extremely overcrowded. Manila jails are operating at more than 300 percent capacity, while the nation’s primary prison in Muntinlupa is nearing 500 percent of operating capacity. These institutions consistently fail to provide imprisoned people with basic nutritional sustenance. Most facilities lack potable water, and poor ventilation spreads sickness, causing an unknown number of preventable deaths.

According to a 2005 report issued by the US Department of State, people imprisoned in the Philippines are most often forced to depend on their families for food because of “the insufficient subsistence allowance and the need to bribe guards to receive food rations.” Finally, as implied by the demands of the Bagong Diwa rebels, the Philippine judicial process is inordinately slow and inefficient, and contributes greatly to the endemic possibility of prison and jail insurrections as well as individual escape attempts.

In the light of such a veritable state of emergency, the four-point Bagong Diwa platform is rather sober and tame. The insurrection itself, which refrained from a large-scale killing of prison guards in exchange for a short-lived negotiation with the state, is most appropriately understood as a collective and politically principled response to the daily atrocities that have been normalized in such profoundly dehumanizing fashion by the Philippine prison system.

Further, the substance of the Bagong Diwa demands shatters the state’s claim that this rebellion was concocted by Bin Laden-affiliated terrorists in cahoots with simple (and apparently, incorrigibly Muslim) criminals. In fact, for those of us in the US informed by the recent domestic historical record, the Bagong Diwa demands echo the seminal communiqués penned and voiced by imprisoned liberationists (overwhelmingly of African, Mexican, Native American, and Puerto Rican descent) in the Folsom Manifesto (1970) and Attica Rebellion (1971), as well as the current generation of political discourse emerging from such places as the Lexington (KY) Women’s High Security Unit (1988-1989), Central California Women’s Facility (1997), Pelican Bay (CA) Security Housing Unit (2001), and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility (2002-present), among other sites of human captivity.

We must recognize, in other words, that the Bagong Diwa rebels are part of a contemporary, living history of rebellions by imprisoned women, men, and children against prison regimes—including that of the Philippines—that have been formed, inspired, and otherwise influenced by the expansive institutionalized violence of the US state.

Human expendability and Philippine prison expansion

The Philippine national government has apparently learned valuable lessons from the contemporary emergence and astronomical expansion of the US prison industrial complex. Most important among these is that prison rebellion is not the furtive and illicit violence of the “prisoners,” but rather the self-justifying deadliness of a militarized domestic force acting under full state sanction. 

The strong advisory and supervisory roles exerted by US military and government officials, along with the increasingly international presence of American prison administrators and “correctional officers” (prison guards) in and beyond the Philippines suggests a particular historical accounting last March 15. This massacre implicates far more than the contained violence of the PNP or even the Philippine national government (although both must be indicted as co-conspirators in this atrocity).

I am suggesting that the emergence, expansion, and everyday functioning of the US prison apparatus, in other words, offers both a historical and institutional framework through which other national governments—in particular those in (neocolonial) political alliance with American global hegemony—may conceive, modify, and deploy new modes of political repression, social control, and domestic warfare.

There are thus several, tightly entwined common threads that link Bagong Diwa to the emergence of the US prison regime as the preeminent global matrix for large-scale human immobilization and punishment.

First, Bagong Diwa entailed a coordinated and public slaughter of imprisoned human beings by a domestic police force under the open sanction of a national government. President Arroyo minced no words when she averred in the hours after the killings that the dead Muslims (“terrorists”) deserved their fate, and that the massacre “exemplified the best of the criminal justice system.” While the scenario of the prison massacre is neither new nor unique in the Philippines, what happened in Bagong Diwa showed that the state-proctored slaughter of prisoners is neither cause for scandal nor is it concealed from public view. In fact, it introduced the collaboration and corroboration of the mass media as well as the mobilization of a popular (and global) consensus that draws from the sturdy ideological toolboxes of “law and order,” “national/Homeland security,” and “anti-terrorism.” Such is the common language of the US prison regime writ global.

Second, Bagong Diwa demonstrates how the state’s organized killing of its own captives—whether by siege, individual assassination, medical neglect, or other means—can pronounce and perform a logic of human expendability, often defined through the overlapping categories of “race,” region, and religion.  In the case of Philippine prison and criminal justice system, the poor are clearly primed for social liquidation, while in the US, poor people of African, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Native American descent are most frequently targeted for group-based punishment and periodic elimination.

Third, Muslims constitute a captive political bloc, often taking the lead in challenging prison guards and administrators in moments of crisis or insurrection. In the Philippines, a complex and mass-based struggle for religious freedom, national democracy, and sovereignty has been thriving among Muslims in the southern islands for at least several decades. Thus, there is all the more reason for imprisoned Muslims (including and beyond members and affiliates of the Abu Sayyaf) to embody the leading edge of insurgency against proliferating state terror and institutionalized dehumanization.

The aftermath of March 15 entwines the fourth thread connecting Bagong Diwa to the global expansion of the American prison regime. It is wholly possible that the legacy of this rebellion and state-conducted massacre will be a new era of Philippine “prison reform” and prison expansion, both of which will undoubtedly be informed, assisted and politically supported by the US government and military, as well as its expansive prison establishment.

There is a clear historical precedent for this possibility. In the immediate aftermath of the Folsom Manifesto, Attica rebellion, and a number of other early 1970s insurrections by politicized imprisoned people in the U.S., the foundation was laid for the industrialization and astronomical multiplication of the prison apparatus as a primary method of political repression and social (dis)organization. Reformist calls for institutional change resonated through the mid-to-late 1970s, as a fragile alliance of imprisoned activists, “prisoner’s rights” supporters, attorneys, liberal policymakers, criminologists, judges, elected officials and prison administrators enacted a broad agenda that would ostensibly improve prison living conditions (for example, alleviating the overcrowding and undernourishment of “inmates”), stamp out the most heinous forms of institutional corruption, and “professionalize” (and multiply) prison staff.

This generally well-intentioned reformist agenda, however, was quickly absorbed into the political impetus and economic drive for more and “better” prisons. In concert with the racist and anti-poor mobilization of the reactionary “War on Drugs” in the 1980s, the United States increased its total incarcerated population almost tenfold in less than a generation. By 1990, more than a million people were held in American jails and prisons and shortly thereafter the US became the world’s per capita leader in human warehousing. The rapid growth of women’s prisons through the 1990s, and the more recent transformation of US “immigrant detention” facilities (through the militarization of the US-Mexico border and domestic War on Terror), have further extended the scope of this apparatus.

The current yield of the putative 1970s prison reform movement in the U.S. has thus been the criminalization and astronomical imprisonment of more than a million Black people (who compose 12 percent of the “free” American polity and more than 50 percent of its imprisoned population), and the disproportionate incarceration of Latinos and Latinas, Native Americans, and other racially pathologized and poor populations. Immigrants of color—both “legal” and “illegal”—are increasingly and strategically subsumed under rubrics of “criminality” (including that of the “suspected terrorist”), and their very presence in the US is frequently challenged as a fundamental threat to Homeland Security.

The Bagong Diwa massacre has now, at the beginning of the 21st century, brought fleeting attention to the extreme overcrowding, institutionalized corruption, administrative and staff incompetence, and insufficient facilities that permeate the fledgling post-martial law Philippine national prison system. As such, the Philippines is poised for a dramatic prison and jail expansion, buttressed by a state and popular mandate to “reform” the institutional methods and enhance the bureaucratic scale of its capacities to mass-incarcerate.

The Arroyo administration will likely justify a commitment to Philippine “law and order” by pointing to the Bagong Diwa insurrection as the unfortunate (and perhaps inevitable) outcome of prison overcrowding, understaffing, and institutional underdevelopment. These alleged insufficiencies of the prison system will then be portrayed as an imminent threat to national and local “security,” particularly in the long cast shadow of the globalized “War on Terror” (which in the Philippines, is little more than an elaboration of the decades long civil war against Muslims). In the midst of the US prison juggernaut, which now holds about 2.5 million people captive (including children), we must anticipate and prepare for the reform, transformation, and expansion of the Philippine police and prison apparatuses.

Political possibilities and Philippine diaspora

The final and most important strand linking the Bagong Diwa massacre to the global presence of the US prison industrial complex is the political onus it bears upon the global Left generally—and diasporic Filipinos specifically—who are committed to struggle for human liberation and freedom in the face of such overwhelming state violence.

The tragedy of 15 March 2005 is an allegory of the everyday for the increasing numbers of ordinary people who must suffer and die at the hands of the PNP, the Philippine jail and prison apparatus, and the U.S. prison regime writ large. There is, in other words, a kinship of captivity that is shared by ever-increasing numbers of people in localities across the world that are somehow touched by the virus of American-style imprisonment, an unholy matrimony of mass-based human immobilization and acute bodily punishment.

A mounting movement for the fundamental transformation of the American prison, policing, and criminal justice systems has taken flight since the late 1990s, and has begun to blossom as the resurgence of the late-19th century US abolitionist movement. The nightmare of the American prison is now bleeding into our very pores, as its violence is literally becoming the way of the world—even and especially in our ancestral “homeland.”

Bagong Diwa has abruptly called us forth as protagonists in this state of emergency. As the soil hardens on the mass graves of the 22 prisoners killed at Bagong Diwa, the question remains as to whether and how we will muster a response. Bulatlat

Dylan Rodríguez works with the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective (http://cffsc.focusnow.org) and Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex (http://criticalresistance.org). He is also an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.  

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