ABSTRACT
The previous chapter presented a detailed understanding of the Philippines correctional system and a baseline appreciation of how VEOs may adapt to their immediate environment. In the Philippines, the environment in which convicted offenders are housed varies considerably between remand jails and prisons. This chapter presents findings that challenge the contemporary orthodox view on prison radicalisation and question the default correctional policies that segregate VEOs from mainstream prisoners. To reach our conclusions, we examined the following hypotheses, (a) when VEOs are dispersed and integrated into the general New Bilibid Prison (NBP) population, they are likely to adopt the norms and beliefs of the various gang subcultures, which inhibit radicalising other inmates and encourage disengagement from their militant pasts; and (b) when VEOs are segregated from the general prison population and incarcerated together, in the Bicutan Jail Complex, they are unlikely to adopt other patterns of behaviour or beliefs, thereby retaining, and possibly even exacerbating, their militant values. We also examined whether VEOs who had a history of criminality, namely kidnapping and drug trafficking, adapted more readily to inmate subcultures in NBP than those with no criminal record or only a history of violent extremism. We compared the social, vocational, personal and behavioural factors of the VEOs. Prisoners tend to specialise in certain types of offending and, therefore, a VEO’s past offences may be indicative of future offending patterns. As a variety of offences were committed by individuals labelled as VEOs in the prisons and jails we examined, we found that adjustment to imprisonment also varied among them when they were integrated into the prison population.
