P 4-B FUND FOR PROPOSED ‘SUPER JAIL’ NOT INCLUDED IN 2023 BUDGET

Sen. Ronald dela Rosa on Sunday took the Department of Justice (DOJ) to task for supposedly passing to the Senate the task of looking for funds, a constitutional mandate solely given to lawmakers in wielding the power of the purse.

Dela Rosa, the Senate public order committee chair, said the DOJ should have included in its original budget request for 2023 the P4 billion it was asking for the construction of a “supermax,” or a modern jail facility for heinous crime convicts.

Under the reconciled version of Senate Bill No. 1055 and House Bill No. 10355, which has since lapsed into law, the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) was tasked with building a special detention structure to decongest the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City.

Dela Rosa noted that the funding for the project was nowhere to be found in the proposed P5.3-trillion National Expenditure Program that the executive branch had submitted to Congress.

“We only approve [the budget requests] in the Senate. They should not have burdened us with the problem of looking for funds,” Dela Rosa said in a radio interview.

The police general-turned-senator said the DOJ should have also convinced the Department of Budget and Management to allot funds for the project.

During the Senate budget deliberations, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla said BuCor, an attached of the DOJ, would need at least P4 billion to construct a maximum security jail for some 2,000 convicts in Sablayan town, Mindoro Occidental province.

The DOJ had already started discussing the project with the Department of Public Works and Highways, according to Remulla.