Filipino prison inmates enjoy drugs and prostitutes: official

Filipino prison inmates enjoy drugs and prostitutes: official

MANILA (AFP): Drug use is rife at the Philippines' overcrowded main prison, where inmates consort with prostitutes pretending to be visiting wives, jail officials said yesterday.

Bureau of Prisons director Vicente Vinarao said relatives of inmates regularly smuggled the illegal stimulant metamphetamine hydrochloride, known here as "shabu" and elsewhere as "ice," into the New Bilibid Prison (NBP).

"There are so many ways of smuggling illegal drugs inside but we are trying our best to minimize if not to fully stop it," he said on a radio talk show, adding: "We could not preclude the possibility that some of our guards are also involved."

NBP Superintendent Juanito Leopando told the station that women visitors usually hid the drugs in their underwear. "At one time, a woman swallowed a plastic packet of 'shabu' when guards asked her to open her mouth during a routine search," he said.

"Our female guards routinely conduct a thorough search on female visitors," Vinarao said. One woman was found hiding a 15- centimeter plastic tube full of ice in her anus, while another visitor had emptied a can of pineapple juice, replaced it with the drug and welded it back shut.

The NBP, situated in a southern Manila suburb, is "overcrowded," holding 9,727 of the total 16,995 prisoners held inside seven prisons managed by the justice department, Vinarao said.

By contrast, there are 117 vacancies for positions as NBP prison guards, Vinarao said, without saying how many actually guarded the facility.

He said strip searches had also occasionally turned up such deadly implements as "guns and grenades."

The health department tested 1,006 inmates on a voluntary basis for the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) virus last month following reports that a prostitute with AIDS had plied her trade inside the prison walls.

Leopando said they were still waiting for the results of laboratory tests, but that if extensive infection had occurred, "it is our moral duty to expand the tests for their own safety."

Vinarao defended his subsequent controversial decision to segregate homosexual inmates, saying it was for their own safety.

He said "we are trying our best to eliminate the problem" of prostitution inside the jail, but said prostitutes were wise to it, resorting to forgers to make fake documents identifying them as wives of inmates.