A Prison Without Walls
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By Butch Dalisay
When they took over the Philippines at the start of the century, one of the first things the Americans did was to find a place for the people nobody else wanted: lepers and convicts. They found it in Palawan, that ruggedly beautiful cluster of islands about 300 miles southwest of Manila, even today touted to be the Philippines' "last frontier."
The lepers were sent to Culion island, on the province's northern tip. The prisoners went to Iwahig, a vast expanse of forest and mangrove just outside the capital of Puerto Princesa -- there, according to historian Nilo Ocampo, quoting colonial sources, to receive "training for the duties and responsibilities of good citizenship." Sixty long-termers arrived at Iwahig in 1904 to lay the foundations -- literally -- for the new penal colony.
They were not the first of their kind to come to Palawan. The remote province -- and Puerto Princesa -- had long been favored by national authorities as places of exile for their enemies. During the struggle for independence from Spain, many revolutionaries were sent to Balabac island in the south as a result of their political activities.
There may have been a time when Iwahig was thought of as a local version of Devil's Island, that infamous outpost of French colonial cruelty in the Guianas. After the Second World War, Filipino officials suspected of collaboration, as well as other prominent figures -- such as Casto "GY" Alejandrino, a leading Hukbalahap officer, and the notorious swindler Hilario Moncado -- were interned in Iwahig.
Today Iwahig Penal Colony is the country's, and probably the world's, largest facility of its kind: an open-air, practically wall-less community of minimum-security prisoners serving out the last years of their terms. The barangay that the colony technically comprises is larger than the whole of Quezon City. It is a vast plain bordered by mountains on one side and by the mangrove-fringed sea on the other. The prison facility itself stands in the middle of the plain, about half an hour's drive away from downtown Puerto. And no visit to Palawan would be complete without a swing through Iwahig and the nearby Crocodile Farm.
Iwahig remains a correctional facility, but barely so. A guardhouse on the main entry road tracks incoming and outgoing visitors, but the formalities are perfunctory, attended only by inmates hawking their handcrafted souvenir wares. The dusty road runs past ricefields spangled with the thin white profiles of heron-like birds; no one disturbs them, not the inmates, who would rather stay indoors on a warm day.
The buildings on the property are cracked and faded with age and disrepair. The best-kept houses are those of the prison officials and their families; a community lives and thrives here, but the casual visitor will see very few people on the colony's streets. An orange-shirted work gang might cross the road; a uniformed guard might peer out a window; but here it is difficult to tell who the guards and the inmates are, so freely do they commingle.
The prettiest structure -- what might have been a large dormitory or a social hall -- is a large 1920-ish or 1930-ish two-story building fronted by an impressive flight of whitewashed stairs, curving out gracefully like an open fan. Its walls retain the memory of an old rose tint, and the metalwork on its windows -- no matter how rusted -- is incongruously delicate. In this showcase of ironies, a friend remembers having seen a group of inmates dashing across a field, chasing colorful butterflies to catch and to sell to collectors.
The colony can also be entered (and presumably left) by boat, on the Iwahi River. Now and then, they say, some prisoners have actually made a break for it; it seems simple and easy enough to succeed, given the size and the porousness of the place. But most inmates apparently believe that life out there -- wherever -- cannot possibly be much better than what they already have. It seems a romantic notion, and there are certain to be more hardships at Iwahig than meet the tourist eye, but it's a long way -- and a whole lifestyle apart -- from Muntinlupa and the city jail.
Butch Dalisay (Jose Dalisay Jr.) has published nine books of fiction, drama, and essays, and writes a weekly column for the Style section of Today. He has won Palanca, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Ten Outstanding Young Men, and National Book Awards for his writing. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and teaches English and creative writing at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.
