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ONCE upon a time, when one is an inmate of either the
Cebu provincial jail or the city’s rehabilitation center, one is
immediately a marked person. Socially, that is, as someone who
should not be within a ten-foot pole vicinity from where you are. By
our standard of social acceptability, one becomes an outcast the
moment one wears the orange-colored prison garb. However, strangely
enough, it is not quite so anymore now.
During the past many months now,
the Cebuano public has begun to loosen up on its tight social
attitude towards the orange-clothed men and women in the new
provincial rehabilitation facility in Barangay Kalunasan, a village
that overlooks the city. The Cebuano public’s curious attitudinal
change towards the jail inhabitants is decidedly media-induced, due
to reports about the inmates’ unusual accomplishment.
It all begun one day when Cebu
capitol security consultant Byron Garcia latched on to the idea of
getting the inmates to do something useful and self-respect
enhancing activity. Boredom and inactivity breed all sorts of
“gimmicks,” if only to while away the hours of the day in
unproductive confinement. When the idea of harnessing them as a
group called the “dancing inmates,” there was immediate concern
over security.
But the Cebu Provincial Detention
and Rehabilitation Center persisted. When the hundreds of dancing
jail inmates were made to perform inside the provincial detention
and rehabilitation facility, it was an electrifying success. Their
performance drew notice outside the province, and eventually their
Michael Jackson number, the “Thriller,” was shown on and viewed
close to 10 million times on the YouTube.
The international recognition
Cebu’s dancing inmates received won them not only self-respect but
also a collective change in their image. It is the reason why Garcia
explored the possibility of having the inmates present their act
during the Sinulog 2008 at the Cebu City sports center on Sunday,
January 20. But with 100 inmates performing, there was a problem
with security.
The Sinulog Foundation officials,
always in search of new number to present to the thousands of
visiting tourists, were titillated at the thought. But Cebu City
Mayor Tomas Osmena would have nothing to do with it. In a statement,
he said: “I will not allow it even if Michael Jackson joins them.
In jail, the inmates can dance all they want.” Has politics gone
into the issue, with “bad blood” between him and the Guv?
Byron, younger brother of Gov.
Gwendolyn Garcia, wrote a two-page letter to Vice Mayor Michael Rama,
the designated Sinulog supreme, assuring security. The inmates will
have one security guard each. They will travel in two buses where
they will stay before their performance and immediately herded back
to the buses after the 5-minute show.
The travail of the dancing
inmates, however, is essentially a product of the political problem
between Mayor Osmeña and Governor Garcia. People see Osmeña’s
attitude not merely as a concern about security. Lately, though,
rather than controvert the mayor, Guv Gwen was conciliatory.
Time magazine in its Dec. 19
issue, placed the inmates music video as No. 5 on its list of “10
most popular videos,” registering some ten million hits. It would
have been a crowning glory of sort to the hundreds of “accused
rapists, murderers, and drug dealers” doing an act that for the
first time that has the public applauding and praising them, for the
first time in their lives.
Unluckily, because of politics,
the event is not going to pass. It is sad that the inmates’ shot
at fame is in somebody else’s hand.
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