MAGIS

Imprisoned, Impassioned
Mr. Jonathan Lacson, H2 Team Leader

Posted Thursday, 23-Feb-2006 12:05 PM

      Until one summer a few years ago, never did it come to my mind that I would actually be able to go inside a prison camp and interact with the inmates. Xavier School had, as one of its venues for the Faculty Outreach Activity, the Medium Security Prison of the Bureau of Corrections in Muntinlupa City.

      This school year, the Bilibid Trip became the service activity of the sophomore batch, and as the H2 Team Leader, I have been with every class, the most recent being H2D, which went there on Thursday,    February 9.

      With its tendency to create and reinforce stereotypes, the media has given many of us not-so-good ideas and images of prison. We imagine and anticipate a place that is filled with tough-looking, tattoo-filled, knife-wielding, crime-hardened men. It is a no-man’s land which we will not dare venture into. Our fear, combined with our ignorance, heightens our bias against jails and the people who inhabit them.

      Traveling to places makes the unknown more familiar. We realize that what we perceive to be fearsome can actually be fearful, and that even in the unlikeliest of places, good hearts abound, yearning for acceptance and understanding. Such is the Bilibid Trip.

      As it in my first experience of Bilibid, the Xaverians come face-to-face with the inmates, one-on-one. Student and prisoner become friends; class distinctions are forgotten. The inmate gets a glimpse of the student’s privileged life while the student gets immersed into his friend’s ordeals. It is an exchange of experiences, a sharing of advice and an offering of encouragement.

      With a meager 40 pesos as food allowance per inmate per day, and an even more miserable one peso for medicine per inmate per day, our new-found friends learn to manage, to improvise, to live. With hardly any or no friends and family to visit them, owing to poverty and/or abandonment, they struggle to keep their sanity intact, to keep their spirit whole, to hope even when hoping seems futile.

      Truly, those of us who are ensconced in our ivory tower, the contented cows among us, have a lot to learn from our inmate friends. Through them we become more grateful for our blessings: our freedom, our family, our education. Through them we are inspired to give our all in anything and everything we do, to treat every activity as special, from studying for a quiz to rendering a song-and-dance number for the inmates. We become braver and bolder in breaking away from our own “prisons:” our fears, our insecurities, our bad attitudes. Because of them, we emerge more compassionate toward the marginalized sectors of our society. We realize that we, the more educated and well-off, have a responsibility to help the less fortunate rise about their poverty to live happier and more fulfilling lives.

      It is both saddening and maddening that our prisons are at the bottom rung in the ladder of priorities as far as the governmental budget allocation is concerned. If the inmates are to be successfully reintegrated into society, then they have to receive best rehabilitation program possible.

      The Bilibid Trip is not a one-shot deal. In fact, it paves the way for greater social consciousness. It challenges each and every one to help break the stigma attached to former prisoners and to other “undesirables”  as well. 

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