The Society of Honor by Joe America

Why the War on Drugs, Congested Jails, and Barangay Justice Are the Same Story

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By Karl Garcia

The Philippines does not suffer from a shortage of laws. It does not suffer from a shortage of lawyers. It suffers from a shortage of justice.

That shortage explains far more about the country’s recent history than any single leader, policy, or slogan. It explains why the war on drugs gained mass support, why jails remain dangerously overcrowded, why courts are paralyzed by delay, and why the Supreme Court is now contemplating measures such as house arrest and compassionate release just to keep the system from collapsing under its own weight.

The war on drugs did not arise because Filipinos suddenly became indifferent to human rights. It arose because millions had already concluded—rightly or wrongly—that the justice system did not work for them.

A System People No Longer Trusted

Long before 2016, the warning signs were everywhere. Cases dragged on for years. Prosecutors relied on thin police affidavits and incomplete investigations. Public defenders carried crushing caseloads. Judges handled hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pending cases. For the poor, justice was slow or inaccessible. For the powerful, delay was a strategy.

In this environment, illegal drugs became more than a criminal issue; they became a symbol of state failure. Communities plagued by addiction, petty crime, and organized drug activity saw little relief from the courts. When Rodrigo Duterte promised swift and ruthless action, many Filipinos interpreted it not as lawlessness, but as decisiveness—an alternative to a system they believed had already failed.

The war on drugs was not born of institutional strength. It was born of institutional exhaustion.

Scaling the Davao Model

The logic behind the campaign was brutally simple: courts take too long, lawyers protect criminals, and procedure favors those with money. Speed would replace process. Fear would replace investigation. Killing would replace adjudication.

This logic did not originate in Malacañang. It had been tested locally in Davao City, where allegations of vigilante-style killings and so-called death squads circulated for years. Human rights organizations documented patterns of summary executions of suspected criminals long before Duterte became president. Later, Duterte himself acknowledged maintaining a group of “gangsters” to deal with crime during his mayoralty—an admission consistent with long-standing claims of extrajudicial enforcement.

What the national drug war did was scale this local model across the country.

Violence as a Substitute for Justice

Official government figures acknowledge thousands of deaths linked to anti-drug operations. Independent estimates place the toll much higher, counting killings connected to a broader climate of vigilantism encouraged by official rhetoric.

But the true indictment lies not only in numbers, but in patterns.

Deaths clustered overwhelmingly in poor communities. Police accounts of suspects “fighting back” appeared with suspicious uniformity. Crime scenes were frequently unexamined. Witnesses were absent or intimidated. Cases rarely reached court, and convictions were rarer still. Meanwhile, detention centers filled with suspects who were never formally charged, held in legal limbo for months or years.

This was not a temporary emergency measure. It was a substitution: violence standing in for a justice system unable—or unwilling—to function.

Too Many Lawyers, Too Little Justice

The irony is stark. The Philippines produces thousands of lawyers, yet justice remains scarce.

Legal talent follows money, not need. Corporate law firms flourish. Tax lawyers, property litigators, and elite defense teams abound. Meanwhile, public defenders are underfunded, underpaid, and overwhelmed. Prosecutors often lack independent investigative teams and rely almost entirely on police work. Judges drown in backlogs that no amount of personal diligence can overcome.

Justice, in practice, becomes a private commodity. If you can afford delay, the system bends in your favor. If you cannot, you wait—or you are warehoused in jail.

The war on drugs did not correct this imbalance. It exploited it.

Jails as Warehouses of Failure

Nowhere is the system’s collapse more visible than in the country’s jails.

Pretrial detention routinely exceeds the maximum possible sentence. Minor offenders are locked up alongside hardened criminals. “Decongestion” transfers send detainees far from their families, lawyers, and communities, weakening already fragile defenses. Jails have become substitutes for courts, holding facilities for unresolved cases rather than institutions of punishment following conviction.

This is not justice delayed. It is justice abandoned.

It is therefore no surprise that the Supreme Court is now weighing revisions to the Rules of Court that would require custodial hearings to determine whether certain detainees—particularly the elderly, the critically ill, pregnant women, and nursing mothers—should be placed under house arrest, hospital arrest, or compassionate release.

This is not judicial leniency. It is institutional triage.

The Court is acknowledging a reality that can no longer be ignored: prolonged detention caused by systemic delay is cruel, unconstitutional, and corrosive to public trust. Detention should be the exception, not the default—especially when the state itself cannot move cases forward.

Yet these measures, necessary as they are, address symptoms, not causes.

The Missing Middle: Community-Based Justice

The crisis in justice is not only national or institutional. It is also local.

Years ago, I argued that many disputes never needed to reach courts at all. Barangays—our most basic units of governance—were designed precisely to resolve conflicts early, cheaply, and humanely. Through mediation, arbitration, community service, and restorative justice, barangay justice systems can prevent minor disputes from metastasizing into criminal cases that clog courts and jails.

Strengthening barangay justice is not about replacing courts. It is about preserving them.

Empowered barangays can:

• resolve petty disputes before they become criminal cases,
• impose non-custodial sanctions such as community service,
• support community policing and early intervention,
• and reduce the volume of cases entering an already overwhelmed judiciary.

In the context of the war on drugs, this missing layer mattered enormously. Addiction is a social and health issue before it is a criminal one. Community-based monitoring, treatment referrals, and rehabilitation—handled close to where people live—would have been far more effective than body counts and mass detention.

Instead, the state bypassed both barangays and courts, leaping straight to violence.

Punishment Without Repair

The drug war also revealed a profound imbalance in policy priorities. Enforcement surged. Rehabilitation lagged. Treatment facilities were few, unevenly distributed, and often punitive rather than therapeutic. Modern evidence is unequivocal: addiction is not solved primarily through fear and force. Societies that treat drug abuse as a health and social issue consistently achieve better long-term outcomes with fewer human rights violations.

Punishment without repair produces neither safety nor justice. It produces trauma.

Popularity Is Not Legitimacy

It is true that the war on drugs enjoyed broad public support, particularly in its early years. Many Filipinos wanted order restored. Many believed harsh measures were necessary.

But popularity does not equal legitimacy.

As stories accumulated—of mistaken identities, orphaned children, detainees dying before trial, families waiting years for answers—the moral cost became undeniable. Violence did not restore trust in institutions. It destroyed what little trust remained.

Why Structural Change Won’t Save Us

There is now renewed talk of constitutional change—federalism, parliamentary systems—as if rearranging political architecture will cure institutional decay.

It will not.

The crisis exposed by the war on drugs, jail congestion, and delayed justice is not one of constitutional design. It is one of state capacity, incentives, and elite capture. A parliamentary system with broken courts will still produce injustice. A federal system with captured local elites may simply localize abuse.

What matters is whether institutions work.

What Real Reform Looks Like

Real reform is less dramatic than charter change—and far harder:

• prosecutors with independent investigative capacity,
• fully funded and professionalized public defense,
• enough judges, courts, and salas to match population growth,
• strict limits on pretrial detention with automatic judicial review,
• decriminalization of minor, nonviolent offenses that clog jails,
• transparent data on court backlogs and jail congestion,
• and strong barangay-level justice systems to resolve disputes early.

These reforms do not make headlines. They do not flatter strongmen. But they build justice.

The Question We Keep Avoiding

The war on drugs ultimately forces a question the Philippines has long avoided:

Is justice a public service, or a private commodity?

A system that serves the powerful swiftly while abandoning the poor to delay, detention, or death is not broken by accident. It is broken by design.

Until the country chooses to build justice rather than bypass it, every future “war” will follow the same pattern: fear, applause, bodies—and no justice.

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