Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) Director General Gerald Bantag said the closure of a road inside the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) Reservation in Muntinlupa, which prevented residents of a government housing project from using it to go to the city proper, was implemented for “safety, security, and health” concerns.
BuCor built a wall on the Insular Prison Road that leads to the Southville 3 housing project and closed the road starting on March 20. The road, a part of which traverses the perimeter wall of the NBP maximum security compound, was the shortest route that Southville 3 residents used to go to Bgy. Poblacion in the city.
After the road was closed, Mayor Jaime Fresnedi wrote a letter to Bantag to appeal to his “sense of compassion and soundness of reason in reconsidering your decision to what appears to us as a permanent closure of the portion of road that connects the said community to the rest of Muntinlupa.”
The mayor said BuCor should recognize “the right of the people to freely access its roads and other alleys especially when through the passing of time, right of way of residents of Southville 3 has already been cemented and established.”
In his reply dated March 22 and received by the Office of the Mayor on March 30, Bantag told Fresnedi that BuCor’s mandate “is to safekeep and reform Persons Deprived of Liberty (PDL). As of the moment, there are 28,461 PDL who are confined at the New Bilibid Prison (NBP).”
Part of the safekeeping of prisoners, he said, “is security which ensures that inmates are completely incapacitated from further committing criminal acts, and have been totally cut off from their criminal networks (or contact in the free society).”
“Security also includes protection against illegal organized armed groups which have the capacity of launching an attack on any prison camp of the national penitentiary to rescue their convicted comrade or forcibly amass firearms issued to Corrections Officers,” said Bantag.
He said allowing the use of the road “puts the safety and well-being of the public in danger. It is a wrong public policy to continue a dangerous practice of letting the public pass through the middle of a supposedly high security risk prison compound.”
Bantag said “from September, 2019 to February, 2021, most of the cases of throwing of contrabands inside the security camp had been traced to elements coming from NHA Southville 3.”
“Further, closing of the road reduced greatly the movement of people inside the compound which is definitely helping the anti-COVID efforts of the government,” he said.
Bantag added that BuCor “only temporarily closed the portion of the road which will traverse the side of the Maximum Security Compound but a larger portion of its road is still open and can be freely used by our countrymen.”
In his letter, Fresnedi said with the road closure, “the residents of Southville 3 has been deprived of an adequate substitute for them to easily connect to other parts of our City” and urged Bantag “to remove the wall barriers that the BuCor has created and to sit together to discuss this problem with a common goal of achieving a practical solution to all of us.”
Gabriel Chaclag, BuCor deputy director general for operations and administration, had earlier suggested that the city government should open the Susana Heights Subdivision or the Katarungan Village, a housing project of the Department of Justice, to allow Southville 3 residents to pass through. Both are private subdivisions.