BACOLOD City – Fifteen convicts freed under the Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) law were already endorsed to the Negros Occidental District Jail of the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology.
Colonel Romeo Baleros, Negros Occidental Police Provincial Office director, said those who surrendered were brought by jail personnel to the Bureau of Corrections’ (BuCor) Sablayan Prison and Penal Farm in Occidental Mindoro.
The 15 are among the 62 GCTA-released prisoners from Negros Occidental, based on the list provided by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG).
“We have trackers who conduct monitoring of the whereabouts of the others,” Baleros said.
He added that tracker teams of police stations are headed by chiefs of warrant sections while under the NOCPPO, men of Special Operations Group are also assigned to do the task.
“We’re adopting a soft-hand approach. We coordinate with their families to know their whereabouts. They can report to the nearest police station for accounting and turn-over to the BJMP,” Baleros said.
He noted that since President Rodrigo Duterte has directed the DOJ to review their cases, they can be released again once it is confirmed that each of them has already served their sentence.
The 62 released prisoners from Negros Occidental are among the 1,914 heinous crime convicts ordered arrested by the President after they were released early based on a wrong interpretation of Republic Act 10592, or the GCTA law.
They have been considered committing the crime of evasion of a sentence. (With a report from PNA/PN)
