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BY RUBY P. SILIBRICO
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February 12, 2018
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ILOILO City – An unannounced inspection at the male dormitory of the Iloilo City District Jail in Barangay Ungka, Jaro district on Saturday yielded no illegal drugs. No one also failed the random drug test.
The “surprise” check and drug test were part of the recently announced jail cleansing, said Jail Superintendent Gilbert Peremne, Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) deputy regional director for administration.
Forty-two BJMP personnel and 26 inmates at the male dormitory took the drug test administered by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) Region 6 and personnel from the BJMP regional office.
“We are happy that none among us tested positive for illegal drugs. BJMP-Ungka is a drug-free facility,” said Superintendent Vicente Papelera, jail warden.
PDEA personnel brought three trained dogs to help inspect the jail for illegal drugs and explosives. None was found.
The inspection started around 5 a.m. then 42 jail personnel and 26 randomly picked inmates were ordered to submit urine samples for drug testing.
While PDEA’s personnel did not find illegal drugs, they recovered three mobile phones from three inmates.
“I believe the inmates used the phones to contact their families,” said Papelera.
Inmates are not allowed to have phones.
Visiting family members likely smuggled the phones inside the jail, said Papelera.
Before this year is over, all prison facilities in Western Visayas should have been certified as drug-free, according to the BJMP.
Early this month, wardens of 35 BJMP-supervised jails in the region were ordered to start the “cleansing process,” said Peremne.
PDEA will issue a certification once a jail has met the parameters.
“A lot of things must be done to get the certification. This is not going to be easy. This will take a series of jail cleansing,” said Peremne.
No illegal drugs must be recovered in a jail during unannounced inspections of PDEA and “allied forces from the uniformed service” such as the Philippine National Police, he stressed.
The jails’ staff must also be consistently active in their respective community’s antidrug campaigns, Peremne added.
The jail wardens and guards must undergo and pass PDEA-facilitated drug tests every three months, too.
“Our cleansing process will start from our personnel,” said Peremne.
As part of the cleansing process in jails, 10 percent of inmates must take tests every time there is a greyhound operation (unannounced inspection).
“We are doing this for transparency,” said Peremne.
Recently, text messages in a mobile phone seized from two drug pushing suspects arrested at a “shabu bodega” in Arevalo district were traced to an inmate of the Iloilo City District Jail.
These messages bolstered long-held suspicions that drug transactions were being cooked up by some inmates at the prison facility and these were being carried out by their contacts outside.
According to Senior Inspector Kennith Bermejo, chief of the Police Regional Office 6’s Regional Drug Enforcement Unit (RDEU), the text messages were traced to inmate Werjun Tañate who was arrested in June last year.
The messages instructed the two 17-year-old drug pushing suspects that the RDEU caught where to get shabu (at a rest house that drug pushers called “bodega” in Barangay Sooc, Arevalo) and whom to deliver this.
Alarmed by what the RDEU discovered, Iloilo City District Jail warden Papelera ordered an investigation.
A mobile phone was indeed recovered from Tañate “but no illegal drugs in our jail,” said Papelera.
Tañate claimed the phone was left to him by an inmate friend who was transferred to the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City, Metro Manila last December, said the warden./PN
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